


All Your Dirty Secrets Are Come Undone

by Laguera25



Category: Priest (2011)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2014-09-11
Packaged: 2018-01-14 11:55:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 96,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1265590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laguera25/pseuds/Laguera25
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every priest has a name, though few people are privy to it. Even Black Hat had a name before he was lost to the sands of Sola Mira. In his depthless hatred, Priest does not remember it, but someone else does, and some bonds cannot be broken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shadows Stretch Long

**Author's Note:**

> I'll work on this when I can work on it, but the story is fully outlined, and it will be finished.

It's the little things that catch her unawares. She has long since grown accustomed to the silence left in Johannes' absence, the dull, dead emptiness where he used to be. She no longer listens for his footfalls on the stone floor of a catacombs gone to the vampires and the nightcrawlers and their servile pets or on a rough outcropping of rock above a suspected den. She no longer hears his voice in her ear as they sit to dinner, low and warm and asking her to pass the mash or the loaf of stale hardtack, nor does she feel him as she sleeps, a heavy, comforting warmth at her back, woolen cassock and warm breath and the drowsy press of his half-hard prick against the swell of her ass. Gone is gone, and in her heart, she knows that he is forever beyond her reach.

But it's an uneasy peace she has made with his loss, and sometimes as she threads her way through the throngs with her head bowed and her rosary twined between her fingers, she sees him in the high jut of passing cheekbones or the curve a shoulder. Sometimes she hears him in a snatch of conversation tossed to the winds, clipped and rough and full of secret mischief and humor black and tart as chicory. She knows it's not him, _knows_ , and yet she falters all the same, stops and sways and clutches the beads of the rosary so tightly that they rattle in her grip. She looks for him even though she knows she won't find him, scans the crowd until her eyes burn and her head throbs with the effort, and when she finds nothing but a sea of wary, unfamiliar faces, she drops her head and spits her bitter disappointment onto the gritty asphalt and plods on. The sea of indistinct bodies parts before her, fish shying from the shadow of a shark, and she soldiers on, head bowed and palm bruised by the press of the beads, the smarting stigmata of thwarted hope.

It's cheekbones this time, high and sharp, and her fingers spasm convulsively around the beads as she lurches to a stop and spins on her heel to track the flash of movement. A muffled curse at her back, and then a man trudges past. He's wiry and sallow and stooped, with sunken eyes and teeth gone dark with rot. His lips twitch with the impulse to repeat his dour implication, but then his eyes catch sight of the cross etched into the pale, thin flesh of her face, and the oath dies in his scrawny throat.

"Apologies, priest," he mutters, and scuttles away before she can reply.

 _It wasn't him. You know it wasn't him,_ she chastises herself even as her eyes scan the crowd in search of a familiar flash. There, near the mouth of a squalid alleyway. Brown hair and a flash of high, regal cheekbones. But the man who bears them is too short and too paunchy and too bowlegged, and the flicker of hope gutters and dies inside her chest like all the others. The taste of greenbark and pitch fills her mouth, and she turns her head and spits a foaming clot onto the pavement.

 _It wasn't him,_ she thinks, and resumes her trek.

 _It never is, and it never will be,_ says a gentle voice inside her head, the soft patient murmur of her childhood confessor, an Irishman with powdery hands and a shock of white hair to match his cleric's collar. _You know that, child._

Yes, she does know that, has known it since Priest and the battered remnants of his cohort had staggered back to the encampment with blood on their clothes and several holes in their already-dwindling ranks. Priest was hard and remote as the moon, but he was neither cruel nor a liar, and so when he had announced that Johannes and two others had fallen to the vampires in the hive at Sola Mira, she had known it for truth. The last of Johannes had been mixed with the blood and the dirt on Priest's face and hands, and it had sloughed off with every desultory, leaden mile they had walked beneath the pitiless sun.

 _Gone, gone gone,_ her footsteps had chanted as they had straggled over the sand and grit and parched desert hardpan, and the listless snap of her cassock had echoed it, intimate as breath against her ear. _Gone, gone, gone._

She had not wept then. Such displays of emotion were prohibited by The Church, as forbidden to members of the Priesthood as sex and liquor and a life beyond the strangling strictures of the cloth. She had pressed her lips together until sensation had bled from them and taken shallow breaths against the unseen hand that had coiled its crushing fingers around her chest. Chin, another priest who had come to his majority along with her, had tried to offer what comfort he could with a pat on the back and the periodic jostle of his shoulder against hers as they walked, but it had only served to sharpen the yawning absence of a body on the other side of her, and she had coughed and hitched and spit her bitterness to the earth. Then she had fallen to the back of the line and let her eyes burn with tears she could not shed. She had been tempted to slow until they left her behind, but she had still feared death and damnation then, and she had known that Priest and the others would not abide another loss, would drag her back to the city by force if need be, and so she had walked blindly on, guided by the black of Chin's cassock and the snap of it around his slender ankles in the torpid, early-morning breeze.

Nor had she cried when they had returned to a barracks that had been too empty and too quiet, as lifeless as the crypts through which they often crept, stinking of adrenaline and stale sweat and the sweet sage they chewed to clean their teeth. It wasn't until she had gone into the communal sleeping quarters and seen an acolyte stripping the linens from Johannes' cot that the tears had overwhelmed her resolve. She had turned and scissored down the hall to the laundry room, where she'd tucked herself between the ancient washer and the even more prehistoric hand wringer and wept into the grungy folds of her cassock. Stone under her ass and fabric bunched in her fists, and when the hitching cries had threatened to turn into keening walls that carried down the corridor and betrayed her weakness to the others, she had pressed the meat of her palms to her mouth and muffled them with numb, salty flesh. When she had come out sometime later, blinking against the burning scald of lingering tears and tottering on unsteady legs like an invalid, Johannes' cot had still been stark and bare in the somnolence of the hall. _Gone,_ the bed, too, had said, and though the Priest had surely noticed her blotchy face and puffy eyes, he had offered no rebuke. Nor had he offered counsel or comfort. He had merely passed her like a shadow in the night, and though prayers were offered for the souls of the dead, Johannes' name had never been spoken again.

Neither has her own name, come to think on it. To The Church, they are only priests and priestesses, tools to be used and discarded as it sees fit. Names are for those with histories and families, and the Church's chosen are entitled to neither. They live only to serve, and to die at the behest of the bishops and monsignors who live within the shelter of the city walls, protected by thick walls and high parapets and swaddled in luxuries about which the rabble outside can only dream.

There are few who know it, she supposes, and even fewer now that Johannes sleeps beneath the profaned earth of Sola Mira in a bower of sour earth gone black with damp and mold and the unspeakable effluvium of the soulless damned. Her mother and father knew it once upon a time, but she cannot say if they yet live to offer it up in prayers of supplication or send it to the heavens upon a melancholy wish. Her confessor, to whom she was required to lay bare her soul twice a week, and Monsignor Orelas. Monsignor Chamberlain now, who had ascended to the high seat on the council after Orelas' public disgrace. And the members of the training class of which she had been a part. Johannes and Chin and Priest and Khara and Dougal and Harmon. The Church forbad the use of names, but this was a commandment that had been broken freely and often by those who formed small fighting units as a matter of necessity and petty rebellion. A shouted warning to a priest was useless in a room full of nothing but, and grief would brook no anonymity.

Johannes is gone to the undreaming sleep in the dead heart of Sola Mira. The monsignors are indifferent to the sounds that shape her in the minds of others, and Chin, Dougal, and Harmon were lost at New Absalom, martyrs for a cause that had not mourned them. Only Priest and Khara remain, and to them, she is but a good and faithful soldier. Khara's heart belongs to Priest, who will not take it, and the heart of the Priest belongs to a wife that is so much dust and bone beneath the arid earth, and to a daughter of whom he seldom speaks.

In that, she supposes they are the same.

 _We all have secret lives,_ she thinks as she weaves through the throng. _And the people who now beseech us to save them from a threat they thought past know nothing of them, nor would they care if they did. The peasant does not weep for the wall battered by siege engines and arrows and pots of boiling pitch. They pray only that it holds and weep for their own fate when it does not._

She plods and scrapes over the asphalt until she comes to the drab, compact square of the market, a concrete block topped by thatch and tarpaper. She taps her sandaled feet on the stoop as she comes inside, and overhead, a tarnished, silver bell clangs from force of weary habit.

The proprietor looks up at the sound of it. "Priest," he says. "Come for the usual?"

"Yes."

He disappears into the storeroom and reappears a moment later with the requested provisions. He lays them on the counter. "There you are. The fish are rather good, all things considered. I did my best with the rest. I wish I could offer better, but with the way things are..." He shrugs his massive shoulders, and the nylon of his suspenders bites into the thin, cotton fabric of his shirt.

She produces a wicker creel from the folds of her cloak and sets it on the counter, and then she steps up to inspect the fish. They're plump and shiny with silver scales, and their glassy eyes are clear. They don't stink, either. She picks up the stringer and deposits them into the creel. It would be better if they were coated in a layer of salt to preserve them, but she's lucky they're as fine as they are, and so she says nothing.

The vegetables are another matter entirely. The tomatoes are either hard and green or red and overripe, soft as decomposing flesh beneath her fingers. The handful of onions are mottled and sloughing their skins, and the cabbage is wilted and slimy. The carrots are stunted and jaundiced, but they might be salvaged in a stew. She takes the carrots and leaves the rest.

"Sorry," the shopkeeper says. "As I said..." He shrugs again.

A quarter tin of flour crawling with weevils. Half a tin of sugar. A sad handful of coffee.

"As I said..." the shopkeeper repeats at her dour huff, and she resists the impulse to fetch him a blow and perhaps dislodge different words from the back of his throat.

She gathers the tins and tucks them into the creel beside the fish, and then she settles the creel over her arm. "Thank you," she says brusquely, and turns to go.

The shopkeeper clears his throat. "There is the matter of payment," he says diffidently. He sidles from foot to foot and wrings his massive hands.

"That is a matter for Monsignor Chamberlain." She hitches the creel into the crook of her arm.

"Yes," the shopkeeper agrees. "But the good monsignor has not seen fit to answer my repeated inquires, and despite what the Church might say, man cannot live by faith alone." He stops, shocked by his own hubris. "I-I meant no blasphemy," he stammers. His face has gone the color of bleached parchment, and he retreats a step despite the counter between them, as though he expects her to leap it and rain Divine retribution upon him in a flurry of blows.

But she only offers a sardonic smile in grudging admiration of his feeble defiance. "I am but a humble Priestess and cannot move the hearts of those I serve. I will raise this matter with my Priest. Perhaps he can move the Monsignor to action."

"Much gratitude, Priest." He offers a graceless, jerky bob that she supposes is meant to be a bow, obsequious in his relief, and she can see beads of perspiration stippled along his hairline.

"May God bless you, my son." She raises her hand and performs the sign of the cross. It's listless, more muscle memory than meaning, and she's turning from him before her hand falls.

"Thank you, Priest," he calls after her as she pushes through the door, but she hardly hears him. His empty gratitude is as useless as his rotten food.

It's raining when she steps into the street, and she stops to pull the hood of her cassock over her head. Her peripheral vision vanishes, and the smells of dust and warm flesh tickle her nostrils. The rain beats a percussive timpani in her ears, and her breathing is a sussurrating, tidal roar in her ears. Her feet crunch and slap on the gritty asphalt, and she fumbles to conceal the creel beneath the folds of her cloak.

The street floods quickly, and she watches as cigarette butts and scraps of paper drift past on the current. The water, clear when it fell from the Lord's heaven, quickly turns a dingy, soapscum grey as it swirls around her feet and soaks her shoes.

 _Clinging to the Word of the Church has made us no cleaner,_ she muses dourly as the rain sluices down a pocked wall and sends streams of black grime into the torrent.

She had heard tales in her youth of a time when the world had not been so lifeless, so besieged by filth and grime and squalor. In the time before the Wars, it had been green and fertile and fecund. There had been rivers bursting with fish and seas teeming with life. The earth had yielded a plentiful bounty, and the fruit of the trees had been lush and plump and sweet as honey and ambrosia on the tongue. The dogs had been friendly then, not snapping, snarling curls with matted fur and weeping eyes and skin stretched taut over jutting bone. Cats had carried more than fever and fleas, and people had kept birds as pets, scraps of color and song kept in gilded cages. The air had smelled sweet and been cool against the skin, and it had not tasted of death and ashes.

She would love to believe such tales, these joyous fever dreams of bygone days, but she has seen no proof of them. On her few forays beyond the city walls, she had seen only miles of dust and sand and the bleached bones of men and beasts. Once, she had found the pitted, rusty handles of an old bicycle and the innards of a radio unspooled across the dry, scouring sand like innards, but there had been no magic in them. They had been only relics of a dead world whose shape she did not understand. The only life on that endless yellow expanse had been the warmth of Johannes' hand on her shoulder as he had pulled her away from the scattering of junk and bid her catch up with the others, who had pulled ahead, their shadows long and thin and tantalizingly cool on the burning sand. Back to the march. Back to the mission.

Always the mission.

The only birds she had ever seen were the sleek, black carrion crows who plucked the eyes from corpses and swallowed them down like sweetmeats with a caw of relish.

Water rills down the back of her cassock and runs into her shoes, and she grimaces at the cold wetness. The barracks come into view, low-slung and grim and smudged with soot. Water runs over the eaves to create a drenching waterfall in front of the scarred wooden door, and she muffles an oath as she dashes underneath it, the creel and its precious cargo clutched to her belly. She spits hair and water from her mouth and brushes the soaking hood from her face. Her teeth chatter as she shifts her grip on the wicker creel, and then she shifts it to her hip and passes her palm over the outmoded bioscanner mounted beside the door. The scanner ponders her offering of supplicatory flesh, and then it releases the tumbler with a cheerful beep.

"You, too," she murmurs, and shoulders her way inside.

The interior is as charmless and cold as the exterior, with concrete floors and unadorned stucco walls from which plaster flakes like snow, but it's warm and alive with the murmur of voices and the scrape and shuffle of feet. She pushes the dripping hood from her face and shakes the water from her hair, and after she closes the door behind her and toes off her sopping shoes, she troops through the empty dining hall and into the order's tiny kitchen.

"Mind your dripping," the cook says by way of greeting, and wags a wooden spoon at her.

Mariel has been the cook here for as long as anyone can remember. Rumor had it that she had fought in the first and second vampire wars and would've fought in the third had not a vampire queen torn off her leg in a failed assault on a hive east of New Absalom. These days, she holds court in the kitchen, a formidable woman with broad shoulders and thin, pinched lips and a shock of silver hair twisted into a ruthless, plaited chignon atop her head. Her hands are coarse and wide and hard from years of hard labor, but they handle knives and weapons with equal and awesome dexterity. Hands that had once cleaved heads from spasming, spurting necks now dispatch hapless vegetables and hunks of gristled meat with grim ferocity and martial efficiency.

"Yes," Priestess Mariel," she says, and carries the creel to the counter for her inspection.

The old woman stumps over, the leather bracings of her prosthesis creaking as she comes. She stows the wooden spoon in the belt cinched snugly at her waist and throws open the creel like the doors of a conquered stronghold. 

"Mm," she says as she peers at the fish and prods it with a blunt, critical finger. "These'll do," she pronounces at last, and plucks them from the basket. She is less impressed with the rest, however. She jabs the wilted vegetables with a moue of disgust. "Barely edible."

"According to the shopkeep, he did his best."

"Of course he did," she sneers, and sets the subpar comestibles aside with a dispirited plop. "Says the same thing every trip, and every trip, his best gets a little worse." She eyes the trio of tins. "I don't suppose those are any better?"

"No. Weevils in the flour and precious little of either sugar or coffee."

Mariel picks up the nearest container and shakes it. "Hmph." She sets it down again. "We pay more and more, only to get less and less. Soon, I'll be down to feeding the acolytes hardtack and leek broth, and those fools will have the gall to howl about weakness and lack of stamina. Even the Scriptures to which the Church so tenaciously clings acknowledge the need for bread. Maybe if they tightened their own belts about their soft, ample middles, the boots on the ground wouldn't be in such sorry shape."

She holds her tongue. The upheaval that had accompanied Monsignor Orelas' public and humiliating ouster had been the topic of conversation among the rank and file for months, and when Monsignor Chamberlain had announced the reformation of the orders, there had been hope that their lot would improve, but those hopes had been short-lived. Chamberlain was sympathetic to their needs, but the previous wars had depleted the Church's coffers, and the High Council squabbled endlessly over the meager remnants. While some, like His Eminence, favored pouring it into training and supplies for the Orders, the majority chose to devote the funds to fortifying the city walls and conducting a propaganda campaign designed to forestall panic and downplay the rising vampire threat massing beyond the walls. Hence, the walls of the city buzzed with useless industry while the orders, already tattered by years of attrition and neglect, were left to fend for themselves and beat back the gathering darkness by dint of blood and pluck and the luck of God's waning favor.

"You could make a stew, perhaps," she suggests.

Mariel swats at her knuckles with the flat of her spoon. "I need no help running my kitchen, young woman," she snaps.

She raises her palms in submission. "My apologies, Priestess Mariel."

She bows her head in mute deference before she gets another smart rap with the spoon and flees to the relative safety of the barracks. They're empty now save for a lone recruit at the end of the long, narrow corridor, sitting cross-legged at the end of his cot with a book across his knees. The Word, like as not; it's the only book permitted by the Church. Her own copy is long gone, disintegrated into dust by the ravages of time and constant perusal, but she can still recite entire pages and sections from memory. Sometimes she mutters them under her breath when she walks or breathes them into the concrete with her forehead pressed to the floor, fingers curled around the beads of her rosary. The roil and oily roll of the words on her tongue are more comforting than the prayers that burn inside her like a simmering fever.

 _Johannes and I passed passages to one another through the smoke of the cookfire,_ she remembers as she heads for her own pallet and the rumpled rucksack puddled at its foot. _They were poetry in his mouth, sly and tinged with mischief and smoke and a secret shared. Sometimes he whispered them into my ear when we bedded down for the night beside the sleepy embers. Soft as a sigh against my ear and warm as a caress against my flesh. There was a promise in them whose shape I could not discern, dared not, and an invitation I could not accept._

 _But you wanted to,_ whispers a voice inside her head, and the warmth of a phantom hand blooms against the spar of her hip and spreads over the pale, white plain of her belly. _And so did he, if the urgent heaviness pressed against the swell of your ass was any indication. Heaven knows how you might have abased and dishonored yourselves if honor and oath had not compelled restraint, if the watchful eyes of the Priest had not been upon you. Hot breath at your nape and pulsing want hidden between your slumbering bodies._

She turns from the memories, mouth dry and eyes stinging. She snatches her rucksack from the floor, digging her fingers into the rough nap of the burlap to banish the scrape of callused fingertips against the smooth, sensitive flesh of her outer thigh, and turns to retrace her steps. Down the end of the corridor, his head bowed to his book, the acolyte notices her not at all.

She is not surprised. She is a ghost here, and no more. She leaves the room as soundlessly as she entered it, rucksack hanging from her hand like a fetter.

The bathrooms are small, shabby rooms that smell of soap and sage and damp towels and cassocks. There are too few for the number of people who must needs use them, and most of the time, there is an impatient bottleneck of swishing robes and fraying tempers waiting for an opportunity for a piss and a shower and three minutes of quiet beneath a sputtering spray of tepid water that smells of earth and sulfur, but the gloomy, claustrophobic hallway is as deserted as the barracks. There have been a spate of desertions in recent weeks, with disillusioned acolytes simply taking their thin bedrolls and leaving their white acolytes cassocks on the ends of their cots, but even so, there should be more activity. She hesitates before the door to the Priests' bathroom and considers returning to the kitchen to ask Priestess Mariel where the others are, but in the end, the prospect of shedding her wet robes and scouring the grit of the city from her goosepimpled skin proves too tempting, and after rapping thrice upon the door to ensure the room's vacancy, she nudges it open and steps inside.

She curses softly as she scrapes her hip on the rounded lip of the basin sink. The towels have fallen from the flimsy metal rack and lay on the floor like the sloughed skin of a scabrous serpent, and the bleary, warped mirror is fogged with condensation. There's a water stain on the ceiling, and the plaster surrounding the calcined showerhead sags leprously, undermined by years of water and steam. The shower curtain has torn from the ring on one end and droops on the rod. Someone--an acolyte--she suspects--has tried to repair the damage with the enthusiastic application of duct tape, but it's already beginning to peel, and she doubts it will last the week. The soap dish inside the distained, fiberglass stall is covered in a thick rime of soapscum, but it's mercifully devoid of soap silvers caked in coarse hairs and reeking of urine and sour sweat.

She sighs and drops her rucksack beside the sink, and then she sheds her wet robes and stuffs them onto the towel rack. She had taken more care once upon a time, had once hung them from the rack with care and smoothed the wrinkles and straightened the hem, but that had been before, when the barracks had been clean and in good repair and bustling with warriors brimming with youth and the might of righteousness. There had been no water stain on the ceiling, then, no crumbling plaster. The cause had been just, and the faces had been familiar. There seems little point to such fastidiousness these days. Now the warriors and the great cause that had united them in blood and sacrifice have flown or fallen, and all that remains are the old warhorses too numb and broken to leave the only path they have ever trod.

So the robe drapes the towel rack in a wet muddle and drips water onto the towels beneath it. The water that emerges from the spigot is the color of old rust and smells like copper shavings. She bathes in silence and brushes her teeth with a wet finger and a sachet of sage, and when she's done, she gets out and dresses in her summer under-robe. The fabric is light and cool around her calves as she combs her hair in front of the bespotted mirror. She should plait it, but that, too, holds little importance these days, and so she leaves it loose and pads from the room in her bare feet, her rucksack in hand.

She returns it to its place at the end of her pallet and betakes herself to the kitchen again. Mariel has been busy in her brief absence, and the air is thick and sharp with the tantalizing aroma of fish stew.

"It smells delicious," she says as she enters.

"It would smell better if I'd had more flour to spare, but it was either decent broth or a chance at bread, and the bread fills better and keeps longer. Not like the flour was all that fine," she notes bitterly. "More weevils than wheat, truth be told. Least you'll see a measure of extra protein."

The talk of food makes her stomach rumble, so she changes the subject. "The barracks are quiet. Where is everyone?"

Mariel shrugs. "I'm not privy to the Priest's counsel. This saw to that." She stamps her prosthesis on the concrete floor with an indignant crack. "I've heard a fair few whispers, though, and from the number of clandestine meetings between he and Priestess Khara in isolated corners of late, I'd wager there's a mission afoot." She bustles to the pot and lifts the lid to stir the bubbling contents.

"A raid?"

"As I said, I'm not privy to the workings of his mind," she retorts waspishly. "All I know is that he breezed in here in a billow of cassock shortly after you left for the market and ordered everyone to scour the city in search of supplies. I think he would've sent me if he thought he could manage it. I've never known him to do that for a simple raid."

"What else would it be? We don't have the manpower for an assault on a hive. We'd need twice the number, maybe thrice, and not in raw acolytes, either."

"I'm well aware of what we'd need. And so would he be if he had any sense. He's been half-mad ever since that business over in New Absalom with his daughter. Obsessed with tracking down that hybrid vampire he swears he saw." She snorts and opens a cabinet to her left. "That the vampires might be regrouping for a renewed assault on the cities I can buy. They're shrewd creatures for all their godlessness. But the very idea of a vampire who looks like a man and walks in the day." She shakes her head.

The man in the black hat had become the stuff of incredulous legend among the Orders. It had caused an uproar when Priest had returned from his unauthorized foray into the wastes with Priestess Khara at his side and the severed head of a vampire in his fist. The city had buzzed with accounts of how the Priest had marched into a meeting of the High Council and tossed his grisly prize at the feet of a thunderstruck and blustering Monsignor Orelas and accompanied it with a tale of an organized assault upon the city by a seething horde of vampires. The stories had grown wilder in the telling, nurtured by fervid imaginations and liberal consumption of beer and wine, but beneath the layers of fanciful ostentation had been a pithy nugget of truth no less scandalous for its simplicity. The vampires, after long years of lassitude and dwindling numbers, had returned in force and conspired to enter the city hidden in a supply train. That the plan had been thwarted at the last moment by Priest and an ad hoc band of determined cohorts had been mere chance. Or Providence, as the Church had styled it.

The Monsignor had tried to suppress the rising alarm, but the decapitated head lying at his feet had been no mere rumor to be quelled by lofty words and abjurations to faith and trust. Nor could he stop the people from streaming from the cathedral to see the proofs of Priest's claims in the smoke that rose in the distance. A few of the more intrepid witness had claimed to have seen the wreckage of the train itself, a smoldering mangle of charred bodies and twisted metal strewn over the uprooted tracks, but these she calls liars. The Church would never have allowed the people to leave the safety of the walls, not even for such a spectacle as that. 

The high clerics _had_ seen, however, or so the story went as it wended its way through the Order grapevine. Monsignor Chamberlain had led the others from the cathedral and bid Priest lead them to the wreckage, and he and Priestess Khara had led them from the city and across the burning sand to see for themselves. There are no official records of what they saw there, gathered around the ruins of a train with the hems of their cassocks flapping at their ankles and dragging in the sand, but when they had returned to the city shortly thereafter, the balance of power within the ranks had shifted. Monsignor Orelas had stepped down as head of the High Council a few days later, and Monsignor Chamberlain had reinstated the Orders before his ass had warmed the seat. The Church's wayward children had been summoned from the far-flung corners of the city and assigned to the various squadrons, and Priest had been appointed liaison to the High Council.

The first intimation of a man in a battered, black had come, not from the Council, or even from Priest, who had been staunchly mum on the topic at first, but from travelers from distant outposts who staggered into the city with wares to ply and tales to sell in exchange for a beer and a spot at crowded bars. They quaffed tinpot gin and shots of bathtub rye, and when the booze had oiled their tongues and washed the dust from their throats, they'd spoken of a man with yellow eyes who wandered the desert in a faded duster. The first reports had named him naught but a solitary traveler who traversed the sands, head bent to the wind and lips sealed against any invitations to conversation. Some said he was badly scarred, wattled, bloodless flesh stretched taut over bone and sinew, but they were overruled by others who claimed he was hale and whole and deceptively fast, long strides eating up the desert hardpan. The more fanciful among them thought him a ghost, while the more pragmatic had supposed him just another farmer driven from his livelihood by the merciless vicissitudes of nature.

Few in the Order had given these romantic notions much thought, knee-deep as they were in the grunt work of reestablishing the daily routines and rituals of life in the barracks, but Priest had grown pinched and remote and taciturn with acolytes and abandoned his administrative duties for long intervals, returning days later with dust on his clothes and new lines etched into his perpetually-pensive face. Hours customarily set aside for meditation and study were spent in grueling training sessions, and there was precious little laughter after. Studying came much later, by the wavering glow of candlelight, and prayers were often interrupted by orders to patrol the grounds or venture into the city for reconnaissance. 

The stories they carried to him had been the stuff of mad fantasy. The walker in the desert was no longer a hapless farmer or a wandering spirit. Now he was a vampire, a daywalker whom the sun's rays could not touch. Terrified settlers appeared in the city with tales of slaughtered livestock and dogs screaming in the night, and of children sent on errands from which they never returned. An old washerwoman had hobbled into the city one morning just before dusk, blood in her hair and on her clothes and lingering madness in her eyes. She had clawed at passersby with dirty fingers and beseeched them to deliver her from the demon with golden eyes. An acolyte had ushered her into the barracks for a meeting with Priest, and the novices had clustered around the door to hear her tale as best they might. The only thing to emerge from the room had been Priest, who had emerged with iron in his spine and fire in his eyes and ordered the assembly of a search party. He and Khara had taken a handful of acolytes to scour the desert as far as Mira Sola, but they had returned with nothing but windburn on their faces and sand in the creases of their robes. There had been no demon, no golden-eyed wanderer who rode the wind and breathed death from his mouth. According to the acolytes who had passed the story along with their daily bread, they'd found only the blackened husk of a burnt-out homestead and fragments of crockery and personal bric-a-brac. There weren't even any bodies or dead dogs bested by slavering, scavenging coyotes. Just a tin windmill rattling in the sultry breeze.

Far from satisfying Priest, the discovery had only unsettled him more, and he and Khara had marched their straggling band of dogged acolytes thither and yon, making inquiries of anyone they met. They had only repeated the outlandish accounts of a yellow-eyed drifter who left no footprints in the sand. They had even questioned the remaining residents of New Absalom, the ramshackle dust-and tumbleweed settlement that had still borne the scars of his last journey there. The grim, hollow-cheeked residents had said nothing and waved him on and watched his retreating back as he went. He would have willed them to tramp through the barren hinterlands if Priestess had not insisted they turn back before the acolytes were squandered on a fruitless chase. He had come back more remote and secretive than ever, and even Priestess Khara could scarcely move him to speak. He simply brooded and watched and waited.

Delayed grief, she thought, or fresh despair at being reunited with his daughter only to leave her again, but then, he had summoned the Priests to counsel and spoken of a yellow-eyed vampire who walked in the sun. The rumors were true, he had informed them with grim solemnity; a daywalker had thwarted the sun's rebuke, and it was he who had nearly brought the city to its knees with a trainful of blind, obedient servants bent to his will. Priestess Mariel, her pegged stump propped on a cushioned footstool had surveyed him in impassive silence for a moment before declaring him either a fool or a liar. Priestess Khara had remained silent. 

Then Priest had turned his gaze to her. _And you. What do you believe, Priestess?_ he had asked quietly.

She had studied his face, searching for signs of lunacy or deceit, but she had found only weariness and a restless, chafing anguish.

 _I do not know,_ she had confessed. _I have never known you to lie, Priest, or to succumb to flights of hysterical fancy, but it seems too fantastical to be believed that vampires have created a human hybrid capable of withstanding the purifying light of the sun. Surely there would have been signs long before now--unexplained disappearances, for instance._

Priestess Khara had spoken at last, _Who's to say there haven't been? Not even the Church can account for all the souls who dwell in the city. If a beggar or two were to vanish, they wouldn't be missed._

 _Surely the Church would have told us about such a dangerous development,_ she had protested.

 _The Church has its secrets._ Priestess Mariel had shifted in her seat. _The fewer who know, the easier they are to keep._

 _Besides, the Church has grown complacent and indifferent in its peaceful, unchallenged dotage,_ Priest had noted. _It's been years since the cities were threatened, and the infrequent skirmishes outside the walls indicated that the population was in decline. The Church wouldn't know about hybrids because they haven't been looking. I found him by chance, and I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen him for myself._

 _I saw him, too,_ Khara had offered at last. _Priest has the truth of it._

Priestess Mariel had snorted. _You've taken leave of your senses, Priest,_ she'd declared flatly, and raised her hand to forestall Priestess Khara's indignant defense of his honor. _I believe you encountered something out there, and I've no doubt that the panicky settlers have seen it, too, but it was a man, for all its strangeness. Man ruined this world in his attempt to save it, and what the hordes didn't annihilate, the radiation and biological weapons did. It's a wonder there was anything living at all once the blighted dust settled and the diseased blood seeped into the earth. There's bound to be consequences, genetic aberration. Go swimming in a cesspool long enough, and the sh-filth sticks. The yellow eyes could be the result of radiation poisoning, and who knows what kind of mutants are lurking in the hinterlands?_

 _It wasn't a mutant,_ Priest had replied, and the stony conviction in it had made the downy hairs at her nape prickle.

 _How can you be so sure?_ Priestess Mariel's prosthesis had fallen to the floor with an irascible crack as she'd sat forward, elbows pressed to her knees.

Khara had opened her mouth to reply, but Priest had silenced her with a look. Khara had shot her a miserable, knowing glance and subsided in her seat.

Instead of giving an answer, Priest had reached into his robes and withdrawn a battered, dusty hat singed at the brim and reeking of smoke. He'd tossed it onto the table before him with a flick of his wrist.

 _It's a hat,_ she'd supplied, nonplussed, and Khara had shot her another look of inexplicable pity.

 _What of it?_ Priestess Mariel had demanded, unimpressed.

 _He was wearing it,_ Priest had replied, as though that explained everything. _It proves he exists._

Priestess Mariel had snorted contemptuously. _Any fool can wear a hat, especially one so plain as that. If that's to be taken as an article of faith, then why don't we just drop all pretense and proclaim the whistlings from my backside as the unknowable word of God? It carries the same weight as what you would have us believe._

 _You tread near blasphemy, sister,_ Priest had warned, but there had been no threat behind it.

 _I speak the truth._ She'd sat back and folded her arms across her chest. The leather bindings of her prosthesis had creaked with the movement. _You fought a familiar, or some fanatic with delusions of immortality. It's no great feat to sharpen teeth, not when you're tempted to eat the rocks under your feet just to fill your belly. There's a threat out there, that much I'll believe, but it's not some new breed of vampire who walks in the sun in defiance of God's law. Vampires are creatures of death and emptiness. What you suggest is a creature whose existence cannot be. If it has eyes and shows no fear of the sun, then it's alive, possessed of a soul. A vampire with a soul would reduce the Church's foundations to dust and throw into question everything it has taught since the first abomination bubbled forth from its subterranean hole. If it has a soul, then it's every bit a child of God as we are, and maybe all the blood that stains our hands should burn like the Mark of Cain against our willful, murderous hearts. If it has a soul, then maybe we're monsters, too._

She'd shaken her greying head and scoured her teeth with her tongue behind pursed lips. _No,_ she'd said. _That's the stuff of heresy, and if you've a drop of sense left in your head, you'll never speak of this again, and certainly not to your confessor. It's dangerous lunacy, and if it reaches the wrong ears, you'll be excommunicated._ She'd fixed him with a steely gaze, but there had been compassion in her voice when next she'd spoken. _It's been a hard ride for you, my lad, harder than most. You've lost much and received neither comfort nor satisfaction from it. It's a heavy burden for anyone to carry, let alone one who's known the taste of life's mercies. Seeing the daughter you gave up for the good of the Church must've been a horrible jolt, especially on the heels of burying your wife and brother. It's a strain too great for anyone, and no one could blame you for going around the bend a few paces._

 _I know what I saw,_ Priest had insisted with pettish tenacity.

Priestess Mariel had muttered an oath and stood abruptly, wobbling unsteadily as her mismatched legs fought to establish her center of gravity. _Then I suggest you keep the contents of your rather suspect vision to yourself. We've lost far too many as it is._ And with that, she'd stumped out without so much as an inclined head.

Sage advice dispensed too late, as it had turned out. Shortly after that surreal conclave, Priest had been called to a late-night audience with Monsignor Chamberlain. The barracks had rippled and buzzed with uneasy speculation in his absence. Priestess Khara had watched the clock with compulsive irascibility, and even Priestess Mariel, who had had scant patience with him since lending reluctant ear to his fanciful recounting of daywalkers and hard-fought battles contested atop speeding, burning trains, had paced to and fro between her kitchen and the dining hall, muttering under her breath and fingering the small, onyx beads of her rosary. Anxious novitiates had peered from the barred and grated windows like fretful marmosets and passed nervous gossip on puffs of stale breath. Others had clustered in the barracks and whispered amongst themselves as they gathered the fabric of their cassocks around their throats. For all their idle chatter, however, none had given voice to the unsettling thought that had hung over the barracks like a pall, feverish and clammy and dreadful to contemplate.

But Priest had not been excommunicated, called into the darkness never to return. He had returned a few hours later, drawn and silent and exhausted. Priestess Khara had rushed to meet him at the door with a cry of relief, and Priestess Mariel had poked her head from her kitchen long enough to offer a blessing for his return. She had said nothing, had only stood in the hall in her bare feet and looked at him with shadowed eyes. Priest had held no cherished place in her heart, and she had felt only a dim, selfish relief that she would not have to adapt to the unfamiliar yoke of another. She had offered him an indifferent bow and shuffled to her pallet, where she'd dozed under the pretext of meditation until the call to morning prayer.

Far from being defrocked and excommunicated, Monsignor Chamberlain had reaffirmed his status as head priest of the unit, and though the yellow-eyed daywalker was never explicitly mentioned within earshot of the curious novitiates, Priest had been given open and standing orders to pursue any and all threats to the Church and its faithful as he saw fit. Priestess Mariel had rolled her eyes and declared this development a sign of the Church's unchecked descent into impotence and sad irrelevance, but Priestess Khara had unquestioningly and resolutely cast her lot with him and bustled to and fro throughout the city as she carried out his every order, no matter how foolhardy, draconian, or bizarre.

And she? She obeyed. It was, after all, the lot for which she had been destined from the cradle, and she could do naught else.

It's the hat she's thinking of when she speaks, black and battered and reeking of smoke. "But what of Priestess Khara? She says she saw the daywalker, too."

Priestess Mariel gives an indelicate snort. "Loyalty can be a greater poison than drink. She'd swear the sun rose from the center of the earth if he said it was so." Her eyes glitter with unspoken knowledge. "Do you not find that so, sister?" she asks shrewdly.

She thinks of Johannes, of his warmth at her back, and of the spicy smell of him in her nostrils, cardamom and iron and earth and sweat. She turns her head and swallows around the lump that has risen in her throat. "Yes," she confesses to the wall. It's rasping and strengthless, and she clears her throat. "Yes."

The room is silent except for the solid _thock_ of honed steel on thick butcher block and the burbling bubble of the stewpot, which has reached a full boil and is throwing up a billow of fragrant steam. 

"Go on and set the table now." The gentleness in the command scalds and scours, and only the discipline of long years keeps her eyes dry and her shoulders straight as she moves to obey.

She's still setting the table when the door opens to admit the hiss of steady rain and the shuffle and scrape of feet. The scattered acolytes have begun to return from their various errands, and they carry with them the fruits of their labors. One carries a bundle of makeshift crosses wrought from bits of scrap metal and naive faith. Another boasts a bundle of weapons tucked beneath one arm. Still a third holds a sack that clatters as he swings it from his sopping shoulder. Beads, perhaps, or bottles of water collected from the running gutters. Some for blessing, no doubt. They'll boil and bottle the rest.

"Priestess," says the one with the sack, an eager gangle of a boy, no more than seventeen. His eyes are young and soft inside his face, and his skin is yet unblemished by the trials and privations of war. 

"Apostle," she replies. She cannot remember his name.

"It's been a while since Priest has asked for so much water. Do you think this means a raid?" he asks, eager and guileless, a kitten leaping at the dancing shadow of a butterfly.

"It is not for me to dispense Priest's wisdom for him, apostle." She sets a plate on the table, followed by a fork with a crooked tine. 

"Of course not, Priestess," he says, chastened. "Forgive my impertinence." 

"Ten Hail Marys and an Our Father," she murmurs absently, and sets another plate.

"Yes, Priestess. Thank you for your mercy." He bows his head and bobs his knees in an awkward curtsy and scuttles off to deliver his payload to its intended recipient. She reaches for another plate and dimly wonders what he will look like when the vampire's flashing claws and gnashing teeth prove faster than his youthful zeal. If he's lucky, death will come swiftly, in a single ruthless strike. If he isn't, it will be dealt slowly, meted out in a measure of grim and joyless years as loss and hardship and bitter experience slough the years from his face and leach the vitality from his bones. 

_Let us speak the truth,_ mutters a darkly-pragmatic voice inside her head that is as deep and implacable as grinding stones. _He is as dead as the abominations he longs to fight. His life was ended the moment the church stretched its shadow across his door. Everything human in him was stamped out beneath its cold, inflexible heel. He is just a vessel now, a tool to be used as the Church sees fit, and when he is of no more use to it--when he can no longer fight for the burden of his wounds or the last vampire has fallen at the end of a holy blade--it will cast him aside and leave him to die with nothing but its meaningless gratitude for comfort. Zeal holds no warmth when you're sleeping in corners and lapping water from the very same gutters from whence you once thought to collect God's favor because the Church can spare neither solace nor coin for its obsolete. motherless children._

Another plate finds the table, and she wonders when she last felt anything at all. The answer seethes and shifts within her bones, light as breath and insistent as sand, and she grits her teeth and turns from it and recites the Lord's prayer until the sensation fades.

 _Hope is a powerful force, indeed, my child,_ comes the low, soothing voice of her confessor. _But even it cannot raise the dead._

Though her lips remain silent, her heart utters an oath that would see her to the fires of eternal damnation.

The scrape of the door and the patter of the rain. The flap of wet wool and the scuffle of feet. More acolytes, come home from the hunt. She turns to watch them as they stamp and flap like grackles shaking the rain from their feathers. The women squeeze the water from their plaits, and the young men shake the rain from their boots and scrub the droplets from their hair. Those who see her nod in wordless deference. Those who don't troop toward the barracks to shed their wet robes. The last to enter are Priest and Priestess Khara, his faithful shadow. She stops to stamp the dirt from her feet, but Priest weaves around her and makes directly for the dining hall.

"Priestess," he says brusquely. Water beads in his close-cropped blond hair and drips from his temples in lazy, meandering rivulets. His rosary dangles from one hand, and the small cross hangs at the end of the long strand and twirls in a slow, dreamy circle.

"Priest." The syllable scrapes the back of her teeth like a pebble. "The acolytes have been busy today. It's inspired excitement in some."

He draws closer, and heat radiates from him like heat from a stone. He smells of rainwater and damp wool. He leans forward until their foreheads are but a hairsbreadth apart, and his breath against the bridge of her nose is oddly intimate when he speaks. "There will be a council after vespers tonight."

 _So there is to be a raid._ She nods once. "Should I make preparations?"

"Put to mind which of the acolytes under your charge have shown the greatest promise."

She blinks in surprise. "But why?"

"Just do it." There is such steel in the command that she's an acolyte again, flat-footed and cowed. This close, she can see the age in his eyes and the care in his face. He is too thin and too pale and too sharp at the angles and edges. Even as a young man, as yet unblooded by the cruelties and vagaries of war, there had been little of laughter and gaiety in him. Now even those faint traces have been expunged; now there is only melancholy and the cold fire of remorseless purpose.

"As you wish, Priest." She steps back and bows her head.

The only acknowledgment she receives is a narrowing of his eyes and a thinning of his lips, and then he spins from her in a whirl of robes and marches toward the kitchens. A fighter no more, Priestess Mariel is yet a sister of vast experience and incalculable wisdom, and none has a keener eye for judging talent and its potential for development and eventual success. It was she who had judged her squadron fit for battle, who had given the nod that had pitched them headlong into war without end that had claimed them all one by one until only this pitiful remnant remained. She hasn't wielded a blade in twenty years, and yet, she will be at the council tonight, seated at his left hand and charged as his conscience.

 _And who will she send to die this time?_ asks the cold voice inside her head, the voice of the mountains, and of tombs dark and deep and unattended by God's light. _Whose bones will she damn to an eternity in the godless dark?_

To that she can find no answer, and so she turns from it and sets another plate on the table.

 

The next time she sees Priest, it is in the long, thin hours after midnight, and the acolytes are all in bed. It is only the priests now, clustered around one end of the table in the dining hall. He sits in the simple, wooden chair, fingers curled around the armrests. Priestess Khara sits at his right, and to his left, Priestess Mariel sits with her ungainly wooden leg jutting to the side at an unnatural, excruciating angle that makes her eyes water to look at it. She sits to Mariel's left, her own legs tucked far beneath the chair and her feet close together. 

"We leave on a hunt tomorrow," Priest announces without preamble, and even Khara is surprised. Her face betrays nothing, but her brown eyes shift to study his profile from beneath oildrop eyelashes.

"So soon?" Mariel says into the bewildered silence that greets this pronouncement. "Found the the Antichrist in those death-blasted hills, have you?" 

Priest does not laugh. "We pursue the daywalker. There have been reports of daylight attacks between Sola Mira and New Absalom. Livestock at first, but the last few have been on traveling merchants and remote settlers. The most recent was an old woman and her two young grandchildren."

"There were witnesses?" Khara leans forward in her chair, and her glossy black plait falls over her shoulder and the swell of her breast like an undulating serpent.

Priest purses his lips. "Those who discovered the bodies reported that their throats had been torn out and that they were drained of blood, both signs of a vampire attack."

"In broad daylight," Priestess Mariel points out. "Which is impossible."

"And yet, it is so."

"So say you," she counters. "It's far more likely to be the work of mutants, brigands, or some wretched combination of the two. Evil doings, yes, but not the business of our kind."

"It is not," Priest insists doggedly. His fingers have tightened around the armrests, and a vein pulses at his temple. "It's the work of the daywalker, and I mean to take him before he inflicts more damage."

"You insufferable mule of a man," she hisses, and slaps the arm of her own chair with a resounding crack, flesh kissed by the punishing knout. "I tire of your games and your reckless fantasies. How can you be so sure that this precious phantasm of yours exists? Tell me, brother, and swiftly, with more than a dusty hat to prop your claims, because I am too old and have lost too much to sacrifice all that I have left to the pursuit of imaginary monsters." Her normally placid grey eyes are ablaze with righteous fury, and the silver of her hair is pale moonglow in the dim, uncertain flicker of the light from the sconces mounted along the walls at haphazard intervals.

"Because I know," he says simply. He folds his hands beneath his chin and continues. "Because I've seen him. I've fought him, have felt his flesh beneath my hands. I have felt his bones within my grasp. I have seen his malice and heard his blasphemy, and I will brook no more of either. Because I saw him through the smoke and flame as he rose to the heavens with my daughter in his arms." His voice rises with every word until it is a song of bombast and blood, a homily delivered from the mouths of avenging angels.

But Priestess Mariel is not one to be cowed by sound and fury, not after a lifetime of blood and steel upon the lifeless, pitiless sands beyond the city walls. She laughs, a bitter caw of contempt. "That is your proof? Then by your own admission, this hunt is nothing but a wild goose chase. You said yourself that you blew him to his judgment atop that train. Now you would have me believe that he survived the blast? There's not a vampire on this misbegotten earth that can withstand the purification of flames. To suggest otherwise is blasphemy. If you aren't a madman or a heretic, then you're a fool bent on chasing ghosts."

"I thought him destroyed. Now I am not so certain. There have been too many whispers, too many rumors-"

"Too much longing in your heart." Disbelieving and beseeching. "You are desperate for purpose, for a reason to keep fighting. You would fight shadows if you could make an enemy of them. Enough, brother. Enough. Fight the monsters that remain and make your peace with whatever comes after. But don't ask us to follow you into perdition for the sake of company."

"I have seen him, too." Khara smooths the fabric of her cassock over her knees.

"And that would carry more weight, sister, if I knew whether you saw him with the eyes of your heart or the ones in your head."

Khara drops her gaze and shifts in her chair.

For a moment, no one speaks. Then, Priestess Mariel murmurs, "I mean no rebuke, sister, nor would I impart shame when there is no need of it. Loyalty is a blessing, and the world would be poorer for its absence, but it bends will and distorts the truth when it burns too hot."

"The truth is the truth, and I know what I saw," Khara replies staunchly, and casts a furtive, sidelong glance at Priest.

Priestess Mariel only smiles. "In that we are agreed, sister. Which is why I refuse to let this go any further. There is no daywalker, Priest. I will not countenance this hunt."

"I don't need your approval, Priestess, merely your obedience. The Monsignor himself has ordered this hunt."

She gapes at him. "The Monsignor?" she repeats incredulously. "You've infected him with this madness?"

"He has given me full authority in this matter."

Priestess Mariel shakes her head. "No," she says flatly. "I refuse to believe he sanctioned this. If he did, it's because you've told him some faint shade of the truth." She heaves herself out of her chair and starts for the door.

"The meeting isn't over, sister," Priest calls.

"It is for me. I'll have no part in this. I didn't train and feed these children of God just to see them used as fodder in some quixotic quest. I'm going to the Monsignor. Pray God he'll still see reason."

"He has seen it, which is why he has given me his grace. And if forced to choose between a priest who has seen battle against the enemy and carried proof of a tale thought wild in his hands and one who who has spent the last twenty years in a kitchen, boiling fish and scouring pots and bestowing blessings upon the dishwater, who will he believe?"

"Priest!" Khara exclaims, shocked at such uncharacteristic harshness.

 _Whatever happened on that train changed him,_ she thinks as she watches the exchange in silence. _And not for the better._

 _Grief always leaves its awful mark, child,_ says the lilting voice of her confessor, and she reaches into her robes with absent fingers and pulls out her rosary. She watches, unblinking, and lets the beads drip through her fingers like blood.

Priest has the grace to look abashed. "Sister, I-" he begins, but the old priestess cuts him off.

"Sometimes I think we lost more than one good man at Sola Mira. Now I know," she says coldly, and then she whirls on her heel, plait slicing the leaden air like the flaying tongue of a lash, and departs. The sharp rap of her wooden leg on the concrete floor echoes in the strained silence, the weary ticking of a dying clock, and then she's gone.

No one speaks until the sound fades. "Do you share her misgivings, Priestess?" he asks listlessly.

She shrugs and smooths the end of her golden plait. "It is only for me to obey. I am but a tool of the Lord, to be used as you see fit." _And I pay my debts._ For an instant, the memory of wool and warm flesh tingles in her fingertips, and she curls her fingers into fists to blot it out.

A nigh-imperceptible nod, and his fingers relax on his armrests. "Gratitude, sister. Faith would be even more appreciated, but in this case, I'll take what I can get." He settles in his chair and stretches his long, white fingers until they tremble and the knuckles crack. "As I said, we leave in the morning."

"Why so soon? We scarcely have the provisions for the necessary kit. One of the acolytes brought some holy water, but if this creature is as fearsome as you say, I doubt it will be of much use. Even the juvenile vampires have gotten good at avoiding it these days, and aim in combat is iffy at best. I can help the acolytes make more crosses tonight, assuming we have the materials, but you've said yourself that they have little effect."

"They don't," he agrees, and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "But they'll serve against the lessers and provide some comfort to the acolytes."

She blinks. "The acolytes," she repeats, and utters a humorless bark of laughter as comprehension dawns. "You can't possibly mean to bring acolytes on this hunt. They're half-trained. At best. And their training is but a shadow of what ours was, of what they need to survive. For God's sake, most of them are still children. A few of the girls haven't had their first cycle yet."

"She's right," Khara says. "I'm not sure half of them would last against an average vampire, let alone one impervious to holy water and crosses. It would be a massacre."

"I know. You're right. But there is no choice."

"Why not?" she presses him. "Why not bide our time, build our resources and our manpower? If we wait, some of the acolytes might make it to priesthood. Our numbers would be stronger, and by then, Monsignor Chamberlain will have established his authority and been able to provide better supplies."

"Training acolytes takes years, and public opinion is fickle. The same people who now cry for our help because they've glimpsed the severed head of a vampire and who treat us with fearful reverence will be doubting and heaping scorn upon our heads when a month goes by with no ripple in their peaceful little existence. Our situation is more likely to be worse a year from now than better, and if Orelas can get backing and make a run at reclaiming his seat, we could well find ourselves disbanded again, if not excommunicated outright and branded as heretics."

"That's a bit paranoid, don't you think?"

"Maybe, but maybe it's not, and what then? We'll be scattered and powerless, while he's free to roam and kill and replenish his forces under our noses."

"He," she prods relentlessly. "He, he, he. You speak as though you were an intimate familiar. Who is he that you are so eager to shed his blood? If I didn't know better, I'd say this was personal."

His eye twitches. "Isn't it enough that he is an affront to God's intended order?" He scratches his elbow with rough, close-bitten nails. "Our current situation is hardly ideal, and any casualties we suffer will be regrettable, but we don't have the luxury of time."

"Luxury!" she shrieks. "It's a luxury now not to hurl the lives entrusted to our care to a meaningless death? This thing killed three priests with scant effort and even less hesitation, and you would challenge him with ill-prepared children?" She shakes her head and tugs furiously on the end of her braid. "That isn't bravery or noble self-sacrifice, brother, that's hubris."

"Madness?" he offers drily, but there is no humor in it, only a grating bleakness.

"That's the kindest word for it," she retorts.

He straightens, and though his eyes are full of sorrow, there is no tenderness in his voice, only the pitiless inflexibility of the Church. "I understand your objections, sister, and the man in me shares them. If I could, I would turn from this path, but I am a priest, the hand of God on this earth, and I am bound to do His will. As I must obey, so must you. Will you obey?"

"Yes," she answers dully, and her shoulders slump. "But I would have it known that there is no honor in this. It's so much screaming into the wind for the pitiful consolation defiance brings before the end."

"Noted," he says, and she's surprised at the gentleness of it. "Now, which of the acolytes do you think have the best chance of survival?"

"Truthfully?" she croaks, and rubs at her stinging eyes with cool fingertips. "None. As to which might at least find a dignified death beneath the enemy's heel, there's Mills. Sanchez is impressive with the blades when his focus is right, but that's no guarantee. He hasn't yet mastered the desires of the flesh. Fontana has mastered her body, but her pride often overrides her reason. Johnston. Maybe Dunn." She shrugs again. "They're the best of the lot, but as I said, that's not saying much. The rest wouldn't last thirty seconds. They're just children, Priest. Children! If you send them in pursuit of this demon, you might as well call them sacrifices to an insatiable God and be done with it."

_Have I become Mariel so swiftly, then? Evaluating children like chattel and deciding which of them are perfect enough to die in the service of an absent and indifferent Lord?_

"Have you further need of me, Priest?" she asks wearily. "If not, I must make ready for our departure."

"Rest well, sister. We leave for Sola Mira in the morning."

She freezes, hands clawed around the armrests and ass hovering deliriously above the seat like a capsizing dirigible. "Sola Mira," she manages, and she tightens her calves to keep from collapsing back into her recently-vacated seat. Her lungs have gone heavy, and the air they draw is too thick. Her ears hum and sing with the notes of a distant Aeolian harp.

"The most recent sightings put him just south of there," Priest replies from the vast expanse of a bottomless well.

"Mm," she grunts as though that explains anything. She wills herself upright and forces herself to meet their gazes. She's too cold. Her hands are freezing, and her stomach flutters and cramps beneath the fabric of her cassock.

"Are you all right?" Priestess Khara asks, and advances on her with hand outstretched. She's joined Priest in the vastness of the well.

She flinches from the well-intended contact. "I'm well, Priestess. Thank you," she answers with ludicrous formality.

 _Oh, I've committed a dreadful sin,_ she thinks with woozy giddiness. _I've uttered a lie before the face of God._

She wheels on treacherous feet and flees their solicitous scrutiny before her wobbling knees can expose her deceit. Pride keeps her gait steady until she gains the concealing solidity of the corridor wall that leads to the barracks, and then she staggers and lurches for a few steps before the strength ebbs from them altogether and she sags against the rough, buttressing plaster.

 _Sola Mira._ The high, rocky outcrop of the hive rises in her mind's eye against a flat, red sky the color of rust and suppurating infection. Nothing lives in its sandy soil. Nothing flourishes there but death and sorrow. The wind howls and raises sand yellow as pus, and in the depths of the hive's corrupted shadows, bones bleach to white beneath the skitter and patter of small, inhuman feet.

 _Life goes on, child, and so must you,_ her confessor urges. _Longing will not raise the dead. One foot in front of the other, that's the only way it can be._

She pushes away from the wall and is confused at the muffled clack from her hand. Her rosary dangles from her fingers, and her palm prickles and smarts where the beads have dug into the flesh. She sways as she threads the glittering black beads through trembling fingers, and when she's sure she won't simply fold to the floor with the first ginger step, she shuffles towards the barracks and the neat double row of billets arranged on the floor.

 _One foot,_ she tells herself. _One foot at a time._ The rosary beads rattle and clack in time to her footsteps, and she breathes slowly and deeply in time with her heartbeat. Eventually, grace returns to her stumbling, fumbling limbs, and she nimbly picks her way through the sleeping bodies until she reaches her pallet.

She sinks to the floor, legs crossed and spine straight and rosary threaded through her folded hands. The cross rests against her palm, light and cool, but she draws no comfort from its familiarity, or from the soft, sussurrating sounds of sleep from the acolytes who slumber around her. The knowledge of what waits for her on the edge of tomorrow has awakened old grief and stirred painful memories. She should meditate, should pray for God's mercy and guidance, but when she closes her eyes there is only empty blackness and the aching awareness of absence, of the bump and scrape of a shoulder no longer there.

It isn't until she draws a deep breath and thinks of cardamom and sweat and sun-warmed earth that the cramp in her stomach uncoils. Cardamom in her nostrils, sweet and sharp and safe, and her muscles go slack with relief. Cardamom, and peace comes at last. Cardamom, and the unceasing tumult in her head and heart stills, the raging tempest of a boiling sea replaced by the glassy, shimmering stillness of a pond in summer, with green grass beneath her bare feet and golden sunlight on her shoulders. No terror now, no endless yearning and an ache that never eases no matter how fervently she prays for surcease and serenity. Just an indistinct figure on the opposite shore with hand outstretched, beckoning her to him. She smiles and answers the summons, heart rising in her chest as her feet glide across the cool, silver water. She reaches for the proffered hand and lets it pull her to the shore, but as she surrenders to the persistent tug of meditation's current, it isn't God who holds her hand.


	2. Pilgrimage to Sola Mira

The world shifts beneath his feet as he walks. It hisses and sighs with every step, as though it were panting in the arid, simmering heat of the desert. The hood of his cassock shields his face from the sun, but it rests hot and oppressive upon his shoulders, and the hem of his robes flaps around his ankles like a gauzy, parched tongue seeking for moisture on his skin. The black fabric blunts the fierce glare of the sunlight on cracked hardpan and the crudely-worked silver of the crosses tucked into the belt cinched at his waist and obscures his peripheral vision, but he's grateful for the meager protection it affords against sunburn and the abrasive, clawing caress of sand. Right now, the air is heavy and still, dry heat against the exposed skin of his hands, but the weather is mercurial and often intemperate, and there's always the risk of a howling sandstorm to scour the flesh from their faces.

He is not alone on the sands. Other footsteps echo his own, mingled with the rattle of rosary beads in idly-fondling fingers. Priestess Khara matches him step for step. He can't see her, obscured as she is by the deep, belling fabric of his hood, but he can smell her, sage and sandalwood in his nostrils. He can hear her, too--the muted click of her rosary at her hip; the tump and scrape of her slippered feet on the sand; the clatter of the kendo sticks crossed at her back.

And her voice, of course, urgent and incessant as it drifts from her hood like wisps of smoke.

"You have to tell her," it says for the third time in as many miles. As before, he says nothing in the hopes that she will let the matter drop, but she persists, her words nearly smothered by the hiss of her footfalls. "You have to tell her, I said." The nettlesome hum of a small, looming insect.

He's tempted to stop and round on her, to pin her beneath his gaze until she squirms and subsides, but that would attract the notice of even the most dim-witted of the acolytes who trudge behind them in a thin, straggling line, and so he contents himself with increasing his pace and retreating into the concealing depths of his hood.

Priestess Khara is not to be deterred. "Did you hear me?" she asks, and lengthens her stride to keep up. "I said-"

"I heard you the first time," he says abruptly. "What would you have me do?" he demands. "Give me your counsel, sister. "How should I tell her that a brother she thought dead for three years isn't just still alive, but an unholy abomination she is bound by honor to destroy?"

_Not just a brother,_ notes the uneasy voice of conscience inside his head. _It was never a mere matter of brotherhood where they were concerned. It was something much deeper and far more tenacious, rooted in the marrow and sinew. It was something you dare not name, something forbidden by the Church under penalty of excommunication and exile. It was love, raw and pure and all-consuming. The book to which they had dedicated their lives in the name of humanity and at the behest of cold men with pitiless hearts proclaimed it the greatest of these, the sweetest of God's gifts, and yet it was denied them, a fragment of honeycomb forever out of reach._

_And yet, they tasted of it all the same, or at least dreamed of its savor upon their lips. They were children when they met, small, scrawny children ten years your junior, wide-eyed and nursing the wounds of recent separation from their families. He was all sullen silence and bristling watchfulness, and she was all wordless curiosity and timid gentleness. He was covered in scrapes and scabs and bruises from the priests' disciplining knout, and she was all puffy eyes and tear-stained face and teethmarks embedded in her forearm to muffle the screams provoked by the priestess' lash. Light and dark, meekness and slow-burning fury._

_You pitied them. You pitied all the children whose lives had been forfeited to the grand and mighty cause of salvation. You, at least, had been given the choice assume the stinking, dusty mantle of solitude and privation and eternal isolation, but the decision had been denied them, made for them by frightened parents easily cowed by the grim specter of authority. You had been given the chance to live your life and decide its course, however briefly, to sow your legacy between the willing thighs of a wife you left behind in the dust of your brother's farmhouse. You had known love and happiness and the joy of possibility and could carry with you the memories of Shannon's cheek beneath your hand as you caressed her face and Lucy's fretful, avian cries from the sturdy shelter of her crib. You had known a desire and a faith wholly divorced from the inhuman, inexorable demands of a god who existed only in the thin, faded pages of ancient books. They never would. The only world they would ever know would be the forbidding, grey walls of the Church and the black robes of its ruthless masters, and the only love permitted to them would be the love of selfless sacrifice._

_The spark of humanity is bright and hard to extinguish, and the children, for all their fear and confusion, resisted at first, chafed and bucked against the crushing heel pressed to their throats. They sought refuge in one another after the initial shock of upheaval, tried to forge connections in this strange, inhospitable world. They learned names and faces and reached out with small, grimy fingers to find the touch of a companion in the dark. They found enough innocence within themselves to giggle and whisper and play games when the chance presented itself. In the early days, before the Church brought its terrible power to bear, you were surrounded by children who tittered and squabbled and occasionally exhorted you to join their lively games of tag and Red Rover._

_But the Church, charged with the task of saving humanity from an insatiable foe, could afford neither mercy nor patience, and so it broke them and reforged them into weapons, obedient vessels into which it could pour its discipline and ascetic dogma. Laughter was punished by the bite of the lash, and games were a frivolity that distracted them from God's exacting purpose. Names were a vanity, a conceit of the prideful, and they were erased from tongue and memory alike. There were no Benjamins or Sarahs or Carls; there were only acolytes. Those who dared to speak the names they had once carried, to cling to a past that was of no use to the Church, paid for their hubris in blood, its rebuke written in weltering stripes upon their backs._

_He was small and dark and angry. His anger burned slowly but hot as phosphorous. He resisted with fists and claws and kicking feet, and his shouts of fury often echoed through the halls, the howl of a snared beast. The priests tried to beat the insolence from him at first, to quash it with slaps and blows, but it proved a futile exercise. The smart of bruises and the sting of cuts merely served to stoke his rage, and the more blood that he licked from his split, puffy lips, the more willful he became. The priests exhausted themselves with their efforts, and he remained unbroken, grinning at them from where he sprawled on the floor in a tangle of rumpled wool and battered limbs._

_The Church is a canny, inexhaustible tormentor, and when one method failed, it simply tried another. The priests starved him, deprived him of water for twenty-four hours and forced him to meditate in heavy, woolen robes and recite the Word until his voice cracked and he was forced to plead for water._

Do you repent of your hubris? _the priest would demand, a grown man looming over a boy as he knelt on the floor with his forehead pressed to the concrete and his fingers snarled in the fabric of his teacher's robes._

_If the answer was anything but,_ Yes, Father, I repent my sin and ask your tender mercy, _the priest would shake his clawed hands from his robes and press his face into the concrete until he writhed and bid him to recite another verse. If the answer was correct, and delivered with sufficient humility, the priest would reach for a silver ewer and pour the contents over his head._

The Lord will provide my son, _he would intone as the desperate boy lapped water from the stone like a stray cur. Then he would step over him and leave him there, licking water from the footprints he left behind._

_And if all else failed, if neither fists nor privation could inspire humility and obedience, then they would bind him in darkness and isolation until either his bones or his spirits broke. They stripped him to the waist and bound him at wrists and feet and suspended him in the yawning shadows, stretched him until his tendons strained and his joints threatened to dislocate._

A warrior of God must endure, _murmured the priest as he shut the thick, steel door and turned the key in the lock._ And so must you. _And then they would leave him there as he thrashed in his bonds. Only when he fell silent would they return with their cross and their Bible in hand, and only when he begged forgiveness would they release him. If he were unconscious, they left him to hang until the Lord revived him and moved his tongue to penitent speech._

_Discipline, they called it, the lovingkindness of a faithful, vigilant father, but it was cruelty, petty and malicious and spiteful, vengeance enacted against a boy for the crime of independence. He wasn't their only victim, the only target of their wrath, but he was their favorite, and they would have destroyed him, killed him before he ever saw manhood and cast him aside as an experiment duly tried and failed, a flawed creature not meant for God's holy work despite the grace that flowed through his veins and marked him as one of the chosen._

_It was she who did what all their organized and meticulous savagery could not. She was quiet and fine-boned and nimble, the very picture of meekness. She was the model acolyte, obedient and eager to please. She excelled in her studies and was devoted to meditation and reflection. She seldom spoke unless spoken to, and always with deference. She trained diligently and beyond even their stringent requirements and acquitted herself admirably if not spectacularly in most disciplines, though when it came to sky-dancing, she had no equal. She was a bird without wings, a goddess on the wind, and even the hardened priestesses--even Mariel, still whole and keen and in full vigor then--watched in awe as she spun upon the air, blades held aloft like majestic, elegant flourishes as she cut down imaginary foes._

_Much to the Church's dismay, her vast potential was marred by her compassion. She was wont to weep when confronted by anguish and the suffering of her fellow acolytes, and though she shared the others' fear and mistrust of the vampires, she lacked their viciousness, their love of the kill. She considered it a duty best done quickly and often wept soundlessly while her blades did their soundless work._

_The Church saw her tenderness as a weakness and strove to rid her of it just as they worked to rid him of his pride. They slapped her face until it bruised and forbid her to cry or cry out. They forced her to bathe in ice water and kneel on rocks beneath the midday sun, and if she flinched or cried or tried to rise, they lashed her. Ten lashes for every cry. They made her stand witness at the punishments of others, and if she wept or betrayed an ounce of pity, she joined them in their castigation, and it was redoubled._

_They were the angry boy and the silent, weeping girl, and they were drawn to each other like the dust to the wind. Sometimes you wonder if it wasn't the hand of God set to its mysterious work that set them upon the same path. In any other lifetime, they would never have met, would have lived and died without ever knowing that the other existed, but the Church in its infinite wisdom and economical brutality brought them together in the service of the Lord._

_She was unwilling, weeping witness to the punishments he endured, and he bore witness to her tears, shed for him in defiance of the Church's monstrous edict. She watched as the skin of his back was scourged raw and blood beaded on his shoulders in sympathy with the tears that streamed down her pinched, blotchy face, and he watched as she keened and hitched and strained against the hand that kept a choking grip on the collar of her robe. To him, she was the voice of justice, crying out for redress, and to her, he was the proof of the Church's inflexible tyranny. They found solace in one another, took comfort in each other's presence and drew strength from the unspoken defiance that whirled and seethed around them like a coalescing storm._

_The Church should have seen, should have known. The bond between them was plain even to you, a child in a man's flesh who still writhed in the throes of your private, wrenching grief. When she was eight years old, that fragile slip of a child bucked so fiercely against the restraining grip of the priestess' iron hand that her robe tore with the sibilant purr of parting seams. When the priestess lunged for her, she was met with a foot to the face that shattered her nose in a spray of blood, and that made the boy laugh as he stood tethered to the whipping post with blood dripping down his buckling legs in lazy rivulets. They should have known when that meek child became a teeth-gnashing dybbuk as she weathered their furious, flailing blows and tried to undo the ties that bound him. But the Church was blind and complacent after years of unchallenged authority. It_ refused _to see and persisted in its foolish course, confident that it could conquer the pettish wills of two stubborn children._

_And so the years and the unremitting discipline rolled on, and with every new scar, their resolve and improbable loyalty only grew stronger. And they learned. She still bore witness to his routine humiliations at the hands of his Church masters, but she no longer beseeched them to stop, no longer wept. Instead she stood in stony silence, feet wide apart and hands clasped behind her back. She did not flinch at the crack of leather on exposed flesh or grow pale at the sight of blood. Only her eyes betrayed her anger and anguish, dark and deep and full of secret wrath for those who cared to see it. But the priests did not care and did not question the gradual shift in her behavior and temperament. Indeed, they counted it a victory and smugly congratulated themselves on a job well done._

_He, too, changed. It took years, and far longer than the Church expected, but the wild, intemperate boy grew into a stoic young man who stopped fighting the lash and the strangling confines of Church doctrine and submitted to its will. The Scriptures flowed from his lips as freely as invectives and imprecations once had, and he displayed a startlingly keen mind once he devoted himself to his liturgical studies. He showed great promise as a scholar, in fact, and sometimes when he spoke of his plans for after the war, he talked of undertaking theological studies at a seminary in Vienna. On the rare occasions that he was sent to the lash, he submitted to its correction without whimper or complaint. A remarkable transformation, the priests called it, and preened as they strutted through the barracks and held him up as an example of God's forgiveness and unrivaled power._

_You believed them, too. The Church was all you had in this grinding, deathless, post-Shannon life where all colors bled to grey and everything that touched your lips tasted of ash and sloughed skin, and better to believe than to surrender even that scant comfort._

_The truth came years later, murmured softly on a voice made rough by a lifetime of screaming._

It was her, _he said, knees tucked to his chest as he smoothed his traveling robes over his feet and watched her sleep in the sheltering glow of the fire, and as soon as the words left his mouth, you knew them for truth._ She always watched, never shied from what they did, from the stripes they left upon my flesh.

Brother, what they did, they did for the good of your soul, _you said, but you had no faith in the words, and neither, you suspect, did he._

_He shifted on the hard, flinty soil of the outcropping upon which you sat and brushed dirt from his hands._ As long as she was there, I knew I wasn't alone, abandoned by a God who took pleasure in my agony.

Brother, you tread dangerously close to blasphemy, _you warned._

_He shook his head, and his lips twisted in a humorless smile that did not reach his eyes and was too hard for the soft curve of his mouth._ One man's heresy is another man's truth, _he said, and rose with the fluid, feline grace of a shadow._ Goodnight, brother. _He left you without a backward glance and joined her beside the fire. He sat beside her, careful to keep the distance chastity demanded, and pulled his rosary from his robes. Soon, his voice drifted to you on the smoke, low and resonant and solemn as he recited the liturgy. She stirred then, blonde hair a shimmering, golden river in the dancing firelight as she raised her head to blink sleepily at him._

Is it time for my watch, brother?

No, _came the softy reply, and it was gentle, so different from the brusque, taciturn man you knew._ I merely thought to offer prayers for your protection.

_She rolled to face him._ Your thoughtfulness is much appreciated, brother. I will gladly return the favor.

Go to sleep, _he grumbled, but he reached out to flick a pebble from the edge of her thin blanket._

Yes, brother, _she answered dutifully, but she was smiling, and her eyes were bright in the gloom. Her hand snaked from beneath her blanket to pat the filthy, cracked toe of his boot, and then she withdrew it and burrowed beneath the coverlet. She watched him until her body could no longer resist the call of sleep, and when it had claimed her and she lay slack and vulnerable beneath the firmament, he reached out and brushed stray hairs from her temple. His fingertips lingered for a long moment on the pale, tender flesh, and there was such intimacy in in the touch, such yearning, that you shivered in sympathetic recognition. You tensed, prepared to act as the long, law-giving arm of the Church and intercede in the name of piety despite the pang of empathy, but before you could move or speak, he sat back and resumed his pious liturgy, hands folded and face turned heavenward and rosary threaded around his wrists and through his fingers. The black beads twined around his white flesh reminded you so forcibly of the ties that had once bound him to the rack and the whipping post that you turned your gaze from them and muttered a prayer for succor and peace. But you found no peace in prayer that night. You sat in your remove and watched him as he held vigil over her. He never slept, nor did he rouse her for the watch. He took it for her, still and unblinking as he peered into the darkness, and when he gave the call to rise for morning prayer and the meager offerings of the Lord's stale bounty, he waited for her to wipe the sleep from her eyes and the dirt from her hair before he went for his swallow of cold, watery coffee and his mouthful of dry, tasteless bread._

_That moment, that simple touch, a lover's caress stolen in the watches of the night, crystallized the vague suspicions that had drifted through the halls of the barracks like smoke from a hidden fire, and you wondered just when it had started, when the chaste, simple love of brotherhood and common cause had ripened into something sweeter. Perhaps it had begun when they were still children and their bodies had slept, undreaming, unknowing of the longings of weak-willed flesh. Perhaps its seed had been planted in those early acts of defiance, when he had howled his anger and defiance at the heavens and she had strained against the hands that held her, a dog stayed only by a dangerously-fraying leash. Greater love hath no man than he who lays down his life for his brother, saith the Lord, but he who witnesses his suffering and cries out against it is certainly a worthy runner-up. Maybe the love came then, a blessed panacea against the agony that simmered like brimstone in his bones. Certainly it was love that drove her to creep through the rows of pallets in the middle of the night and defy the priests to offer what comfort she could to the sniveling, trembling boy who huddled in his blankets, his welted arms wrapped around himself for comfort. Surely it was love that moved her to whisper his forbidden name and stroke his cheek with gentle fingers until the long, terrible shadow of the priests drew near and bid her retreat And it was most assuredly love that kept her at it even after she was caught and publicly knouted by a cold-eyed Father with a pitiless hand. She went to him with the bruises still fresh and darkening on her abused flesh, scraping and tottering with the ginger care of an invalid, and whispered his name against his cheek._

Johannes, _she called in the stillness, the sibilant, furtive hiss of footsteps in tall grass._

_He did not answer, but lifted his head to scan the room. The movement was enough, and she scuttled to him, her hair the muted glimmer of spun gold in the night. The other children shifted and murmured, disturbed by the skim of her passing feet, but none betrayed her stealthy movement to the priests who patrolled the corridors and lingered outside the door. They were content to return to their dreams or watch the queer spectacle unfolding before them, a dream viewed in a warped, Dickensian looking glass. Their watchful, avid eyes gleamed in the dark, embers from a dozen small fires, and they lit her way as she sought for him among the bodies._

_He had risen to one elbow by the time she reached him, and he blinked in wary befuddlement as she settled herself beside him._ What are you doing here? Go back, _he commanded, and scowled at her._

Does it still hurt? _she asked softly, unperturbed by his pique, and reached out to draw her fingers along the band of raw flesh at his wrist._

_He flinched from the caress and stuffed his hand beneath the blanket._ It's fine, _he snapped, so small and trying so very hard to be brave. He turned to look at her._ What about you?

_She shrugged and instantly regretted it as pain flared anew._ It's not too bad, _she answered, though the lie was plain upon her pale, pinched face._

You're lying, _he said, but there was no accusation in it, only serene, childish truth._

I won't stop, _she swore with sudden vehemence._ I'll never stop. They can't make me. I won't leave you. I'll never leave, and I'll never forget. _Spoken with the true, simple certainty of the innocent._

_It was the hard, unadorned bedrock of love, and in your heartbroken cynicism, you were sure that it must be broken, obliterated before the whims of the Church and the rapacious needs of the many who looked to it for salvation from the abominations that crawled without the city walls and sought entrance with blind, scabrous fingers. How could it not be when your own love, vowed before God and presided over by a member of the clergy whom you now served, had been cast aside in the name of necessity and unsentimental expediency? Your love for Shannon had been strong, forged by kisses and caresses and the headiness of courtship, tempered by the searing, sweat-slick simmer of entwined bodies, and cemented forever in the promise of Lucy, who squalled, plump and indignant and healthy, upon her mother's heaving belly. You'd thought it unbreakable as you'd stroked Lucy's soft, downy head and gazed into Shannon's tired, happy eyes, but then the Church had come with its decree and its lofty abjurations to sacrifice and selfless love, and the bonds you had thought so unimpeachable had dissolved like sand before the cleansing wave. You traded fatherhood for priesthood and the snug, comforting fit of your wedding band for the throttling constriction of your holy vestments and left your weeping wife and child in your brother's front yard, ramshackle remnants of a life you could no longer live. The Church had made a liar of you and called you a better man for it. Of course it would do the same to this precocious, naive child who knew not the power of the words she spoke. She would forget in time, or judge the promise unworthy of the price it demanded, and she would repent of vows rashly taken and become a penitent liar just like you._

_But she hadn't. The promise spilled from the mouth of a babe had endured. She never left him, never turned from hardship to save herself. She was unwavering and implacable and undaunted by threats and imprecations. Long after she learned that she could not shield him from the blows of his teachers or brace him against the rending agony of the rack, the circuit of her daily meditations took her past the whipping post and the cells where wayward acolytes paid their penance. She lifted her voice in song as she passed or tossed verses of comforting Scripture through the bars like a sustaining sweetmeat. When she could, she lingered outside his cell and talked idly of nothing in particular, murmuring softly of the azure sky or the smell of frankincense in the air. Passing acolytes stared and whispered that she was mad, broken by the rigors of training, and priests looked down their long, thin noses at her and commanded her to stop such foolishness and return to her duties, but you understood. It was a message in a bottle, an assurance that the promise held true, that she would not leave, that it would be all right._

_And when he had faith in nothing else, he had faith in that._

_The love had been there all along, seeded in those first punishing months when all they had was their resistance to the Church's benevolent tyranny. It was the passion that came later, the raw, atavistic yearning that roiled between them in a palpable haze that sometimes made the air around them too close. They never fell, never broke the vows of purity and chastity that they recited on bended knee before an unsmiling monsignor with eyes as black as the Bible he held in one slender, bloodless hand, but love endures. Love finds a way. No one knows that better than you, the pious, long-suffering liar whose love burns bright and hot within a heart none but God and a bittersweet memory will ever touch. Their eyes said what their mouths could not as they looked at one across the nave on ordination day, feet wide apart and hands clasped behind their backs, newly-minted soldiers in the mighty army of the Lord, and when the ceremony was over and the crosses etched into their forehead oozed blood down their faces and sent it pattering to the white, marble floor with every bow to their smiling betters, their hands stayed joined a moment longer than was proper as they greeted one another as priest and priestess for the the first time. The Church fathers, buoyed by this latest addition to their holy arsenal, noticed nothing, but you, who had none to call a friend, did, just as you saw him lean down and whisper into her ear. You've always wondered what passed between them that day, but that was a secret he kept to himself, a rosary bead he never allowed to slip from his fingers._

_The pragmatist in you thinks they should have been separated long ago, before their love had a chance to take root. They should have been sent to different orders and forbidden from future contact, and word should have gone out to all Fathers that they were never to be paired. But classes were small and the pickings slim in the early days of the war, when God's grace had been found in so few of his children, and the Church could not afford to disband such a promising and cohesive class to stamp out the poorly-repressed desires of two headstrong members, not when their transgressions had not passed from thought into forbidden deed. If they could kill the enemy, then it mattered little what sins they committed in the secret places of their hearts._

_Besides, to condemn the Fathers for their inaction would make you a hypocrite. Age and skill made you the natural leader of your order. You could have sundered them the moment they fell under your command, but you let them be because you pitied them, and because their love for one another made them stronger and fiercer and deadlier on the battlefield. While you doubted their faith and loyalty to the Church and its musty, arbitrary doctrine of asceticism and solitude, you never doubted their loyalty to each other. They fought with fire in the blood when they were together, desperate to protect flesh they would never touch or taste. He offered up his bones as a sacrifice to her safety, and her blood rained down from the heavens in a fine mist to keep him whole, and the blood and bone united you all in benediction and saw the order home again, tattered and ragged but intact and alive to fight another day._

I won't leave you, _she had promised that fateful day._ I will never leave you. _And she never had, until that morning in Sola Mira, when you ordered her to stay behind and intercept any returning familiars. She stayed behind, and he never came out of the hive._

_And she has never forgiven you._

_You doubt it would be any consolation to her, but you've never forgiven yourself, either. He was your first casualty, and you staggered back to base camp with his last, panicky grasp still tingling in your disbelieving fingertips and his pleading scream still ringing in your ears. Khara and Chin and Dougal offered absolution, insisted that it wasn't your fault, but you knew better, and you couldn't shake the memory of his terror-stricken face as he was yanked from your failing grip and dragged into the eternal darkness of the tunnels._

_You did not know how to tell her that her lifelong brother and cherished helpmeet was never coming home, and so you became the priests you hated and delivered the news with cruel, clipped brevity, the ruthless, wrenching snap of setting bone and severing limbs. You braced yourself for the paroxysmic outpouring of hysterical, inconsolable grief, for the sobs and the shrill denials and the fruitless attempts to rush to the hive and rob Death of a victory already won, but it never came. Instead, she was quiet for so long that you began to wonder if she had heard you at all. She had merely blinked at you in logy incomprehension for a moment, and then her knees had unhinged and she'd sat down hard upon the sand, her hands fisted in the fabric of her robes. She'd twisted the fabric in her fingers and given it a series of furious, spasmodic tugs. Her breaths had come in great shuddering, strangled gasps, but she had never cried out. She had simply sat upon the baking desert sand and rocked back and forth in slow, dreamy, strokes, her hands bunching and flexing in the fabric of robes become mourning clothes._

I'm sorry, _you wanted to tell her, but the words were lodged behind the hot stone of your own grief, and so you took refuge in the ritual of prayers for the dead. You reached for your rosary and recited the twenty-third Psalm into your folded hands and tried to pretend you couldn't feel the hot, sticky slither of his hand as it slipped through your fingers. The others duly bowed their heads and lifted their voices in solemn supplication, but she merely sat rocking in the sand, her golden plait hanging over one shoulder like the tail of a hangman's noose._

_It was Chin, God rest his soul, who got her on her feet. He proffered his hand as she sat with head bowed and hands kneading ceaselessly at the fabric of her cassock. You weren't sure she would accept it, but she did. She stood, swaying drunkenly as she clutched his hand, and when she finally raised her head, you were surprised to see no tears. Her cheeks were dry as crumbling stone and pale as exposed bone, pinched and hollow, as though a fleshless hand had scraped flesh from bone and left age in its place. The eyes that met yours were bleak and far too old, and she moved with the graceless hesitancy of a crone thrice her age._

_No one spoke during the long, somber journey home, and she fell far behind, stooped and shuffling through the sand with her gaze fixed upon the earth. Sometimes she disappeared from view, but she always reappeared, an indistinct, grey dot against the pale blue sky. You listened for the sound of muffled weeping, but there was only the mournful hiss of sand in the wind. Now and then, a voice rose in prayer, but it was never hers, and the rattle of Khara's rosary beads was too loud in your ears, the clitter of loose pebbles raining down upon a body sprawled and savaged in the bowels of the earth. It soured the spittle in your mouth and brought greasy bile to your throat, and you wanted to snap at her to stop, but you could find no cause to issue the order, and so you gritted your teeth and distracted yourself from the hot throb of guilt lodged in the center of your chest like a heated blade by reciting Hail Marys under your breath and crossing yourself in an endless, lulling rhythm._

_The remembered warmth of his hand still burned in your fingertips when next you saw her, willing herself up the corridor that led to the barracks' sleeping hall step by faltering step. There was nothing of the crone in her eyes then. She was a child again, eight years old and wailing ceaselessly against the injustices of the Church. Her face was bloodless as parchment and soaked with tears, and her eyes held such misery that you wanted to recoil. The apology bubbled to your lips again, dust and iron in the back of your throat, but to utter it would be to admit your failing and the weakness of your hands, and so you swallowed it like a corrupted Communion wafer and swept past her to seek what refuge you could in the tiny cloister just off the bathroom. You left her to her private agony and locked the door behind you, and when you were sure that there was none to hear, you fell to your knees and begged God and Johannes for forgiveness until your lungs burned and your parched tongue cramped and cried out for water._

_The Lord offered neither counsel nor absolution, and you had no choice but to set aside your grief and resume the burdensome mantle of leadership, but the clutch of his fingers and the bite of his nails as they sank into your flesh never left you, and you could not bear to see the grief that settled into her eyes like festering illness, and so you avoided her and spoke but brusquely to her if you spoke at all. You assigned her to barracks duty or simple reconnaissance and foraging missions or the occasional lesser hunts, and if circumstance demanded that she come along, you posted her at the base camp and spent your shame and impotent fury on the vampires foolhardy enough to cross your path._

_Khara mistakes your aloofness for callous indifference, and far better for you than she should know the truth. It's not anger or apathy that moves your hand, but pity and endless, gnawing grief. You look at her and see her as she was, eight years old and stealthy as a dormouse as she crept beneath the circling shadows of her overseers and tried to stanch myriad and terrible wounds with the fumbling brush of small, pink fingers over chafed and tortured flesh. You see flecks of gold shimmering in the moonlight that spills through the small, grated sleeping-hall windows and a small head resting companionably against a stiff, bony shoulder until it relaxed. You see a tiger cub thrashing against a priestess' unyielding hand and screaming for the lash to be stilled before it lands another stinging blow. You see a young girl of fourteen strolling past a cell and raising her voice in assurance disguised as prayer, offering a morsel of hope to the soul trapped inside. You see a young priestess of eighteen, eyes fixed on his inscrutable profile as a Holy Father tattoos a cross into her forehead and marks her as forever untouchable, forever claimed by another. You see that same young priestess leaning forward to hear the secret her brother would impart, strands of golden hair spilling from behind her hood. You see the warmth in her eyes and the mischievous curl of her lips._

_But most of all you see your brother's hand--the same hand that would slither from your grasp like the twitching tail of an escaping serpent and damn him to perdition--brushing fine, golden hairs from her temple while she slept and lingering there, gentle as breath against her skin. The simple glory of love in a single, fleeting touch. You saw, and you knew how much she had lost--how much they both had--and you would ask no more of her in the name of a world that had given her so little. So you assigned her to as many menial tasks as you could in the hope of sparing her further bloodshed. A meager recompense, to be sure, but it is all that you can offer._

_As for her, she gives less than a good goddamn for your motives, no matter how lofty or sentimental. She knows only that her stalwart brother is gone, left to return to the vampire-fouled dust of a godforsaken cave, and that he who let him die endures to insult her with tedium and exclusion. She has withdrawn from you more with each passing day, become an island unto herself. She obeys because she must, and she fights from old habit and without passion. She no longer dances across the sky with the ethereal, lissome grace of the blessed borne upon the winds by God's angels. Now each movement is a wearisome toil, and her eyes are hard as flint inside her face. All that was good in her died with him, and now she only waits to join him in the afterlife._

_And oh, if she only knew what waits for her there._

"Could you do it?" he asks gruffly. "If I had been me who'd been dragged into Hell and turned into an abomination, could you kill me if she told you what I had become?"

Khara is silent for a long moment. Three beads slip through her fingers before she replies. "Yes. I would do it to ease your suffering." She scans the horizon and the buttes and outcroppings that rise in the hazy distance.

He grunts in response. He's not surprised by her answer; it is the answer she is expected to give as a good priestess. He does, however, doubt, the truth behind it. Of course she means it now, with no imminent threat before them and the knowledge that there can never be anything between them a bitter poultice against her heart, but he knows from hard experience that what one intends behind the clean and hardy ramparts of one's mind often vanishes in the face of reality. Once upon a time, he'd thought he could kill Lucy if she'd been turned, could snap her neck or slit her throat and send her to God with a pious and loving hand, but then he'd held her in his arms beside the twisted wreckage of uprooted rail lines and a derailed train, the fabric of her homespun dress sliding beneath his petting hands as he'd cradled her, and he'd known it for so much self-righteous bravado. When she'd opened her eyes at his tentative touch, he had seen nothing but Shannon in her frightened gaze, and he could no more have killed her than he could have reached inside his chest and torn out his own heart. Khara's love for him was not so great, but love it was, and he suspects that when push came to shove, it would stay her righteous, delivering hand.

"Well, I doubt she could," he says, and casts a furtive glance behind him to mark her sluggish progress at the rear of the straggling line.

His sotto voce pronouncement does little to assuage her consternation. Indeed, it only inflames it.

"Then why in the name God did you bring her?" she hisses disbelievingly, arms flapping stiffly at her side as she marches. "You can't possibly think she won't recognize him. She's not blind."

"No," he agrees, and resists the impulse to look over his shoulder again. "I told you, we can't afford to spare her."

Khara utters a mirthless bark of laughter. "And what will you do if she takes one look and decides to join him?"

"We'll just have to trust in her faith," he answers.

"Then we're screwed," Khara says flatly, and he can't help a flare of affection for her headstrong forthrightness.

"If you cannot trust in her, then trust in me," he says quietly. It's as close to a plea as he can come.

She narrows her eyes. "You have a plan," she says shrewdly.

He gives no answer. Instead, he reaches for the metal canteen at his belt and says, "Keep an eye on the others. At this rate, we won't reach Sola Mira until late afternoon."

"That gives him an advantage."

"Mmm. A big one. I'd push them harder, but they look like they're about to collapse as it is."

"Maybe we should wait, set up camp and attack in the morning."

"We do that, we run the risk of being spotted, giving him a chance to prepare." He unscrews the cap on his canteen and takes a measured swallow of warm water. It tastes of aluminum and earth, and he grimaces as he replaces the cap.

"We don't, and we run the risk of being slaughtered to a man," she points out.

_At this point, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other,_ he thinks, but he merely squints against the sun and says, "It's in God's hands now." He spares another glance at the line of acolytes who march doggedly behind him, and then he turns to Khara and gives her an imperceptible nod. She returns it, curiosity smoldering in her inquisitive gaze, but he does not, dares not, satisfy it. He tugs upon his hood to draw it more tightly around his face, and then he slows his pace and lets the sucking sand pull him to the end of the line.

_One foot in front of the other,_ she thinks, and watches the points of her toes as they dart in and out of her field of vision. _One, one, one, one._ Left, right, left, right, left... It's hypnotic, and it distracts her from the dry, smothering heat that draws the air from her lungs and rests against her skin like a thin layer of gauze. It also keeps her gaze focused on anything but the awful familiarity of her surroundings. Her throat is tight and dry as shale, and she should take water, but to drink would be to raise her head and see the craggy promontory of Sola Mira, its stony, crumbling spires stretching to the heavens like decaying claws, the hand of an impudent demon reaching to part the veil of Glory. If she looks she will, stop, will simply sink to her knees and breathe the last of her moisture into the arid, greedy sand, and so she leaves the canteen in her belt and counts the dust-coated flashes of her booted toes as they flicker on the periphery of her vision.

_Won't be much of an end if you die out here like some wandering jackal,_ murmurs the unsentimental voice of self-preservation inside her head, and her lips twist into a listless grin. 

Better that than to return to the cursed earth of Sola Mira. She had thought--prayed--that she had left it far behind, forever banished to the realm of fitful dreams and nightmares from which she awakens with a scream on her tightly-sealed lips and sickly sweat clammy on her feverish skin. Now her feet draw her nearer with every measured stride. She can feel its infernal presence just beyond the concealing cowl of her cassock, light, skittering fingers at her nape and dry, fever-blistered lips pressed to her crown in an obscene parody of benediction. The brush of a phantom shoulder against her own makes her chest ache, and she cocks her head and spits sour saliva onto the cracked hardpan.

_It's not him,_ she reminds herself. _It can't be. Not now, not ever again._

_No,_ agrees a sly, needling voice, the surreptitious whisper of sand on smooth stone. _But you're going to see him, aren't you?_

Memories gather just beyond her field of vision, stultifying as the heat that scalds her flesh despite the fabric of her robes. She closes her eyes to blot them out, but they only grow sharper, and the fingers at her nape sink between the vertebrae like fangs. The voices of Dougal and Chin at her back as they engage in an amiable conspiracy of friendship. A joke, she thinks, and not one of which the Church Fathers would approve. Low and comfortable, the idle, easy chatter of boyhood delayed. Sanchez ahead, cowl bunched at his nape like a wattle of loose flesh and sweat stippled in his coarse, close-cropped hair in a sparkling diadem. Sage and cinnamon drifts back on the capricious breeze as it rises and falls and tugs playfully at the fabric of their cassocks. _Ollie-ollie oxen free! I'm the wind, and you won't catch me!_ The bump and jostle of a shoulder against her own, and the brief, sinuous twine of work-roughened fingers through her own, a rosary of flesh and bone and hard calluses, and more prized than the ones Monsignor Orelas had hung around her neck at ordination.

_Those beloved fingers are so many scattered bones at the bottom of a cave by now,_ the sibilant voice of the desert whispers with gleeful malice, and an image arises in her mind of a vampire slurping the marrow from the denuded digit and sucking the joint like a delicate sweetmeat, eyeless face turned to the moonlight as it hunkers over a bundle of bloody rags.

Her head swims, and she opens her eyes and turns them toward the sun that its rays might burn the gruesome thought from her mind. _Have mercy,_ she spits at a complacent Almighty upon His throne. _Have mercy, my heavenly Father, and strike the sight from my eyes and the mind from my skull, that I may be tormented no more._

But the Almighty sits unmoved in His firmament, and His glory is cold and unyielding. Reason endures, and so does her sight, and so she drops her gaze and allows it to rest for a moment on the distant darkness of Priest and Priestess as they walk at the head of the line.

_There something afoot, and make no mistake,_ grunts Johannes, irascible and morbid, and she sees him in her mind's eye, straight and unsmiling and studying his erstwhile brothers with dark, shuttered eyes, his rosary wrapped around his fingers like a studded brass knuckle. His jaw twitches in dour contemplation.

_Yes, my brother, he is,_ she agrees, and old grief clots in her constricted throat like bile she cannot expel. Her fingers twitch with the desire to trace the hard line of muscle bunched beneath his cassock like corded steel.

That he is up to something is beyond doubt. He and his faithful fetch had distanced themselves from her almost at once, and on the rare occasion that she has peered from beneath her hood, she has seen him casting furtive, appraising glances at her, as though he expects her to forsake her oaths and flee into the desert, shedding her robes as she went.

_Perhaps they're discussing my disturbing lack of faith,_ she muses as she watches Priestess stamp along beside him like an angry magpie, arms flapping indignantly.

And why shouldn't they? Most of her faith had died here on the desert sand, seeped into the baking earth beneath her ass while she rocked to and fro and looked anywhere but at the ragged emptiness where he should have been.

In truth, she isn't sure why Priest brought her here. Sola Mira had been her last mission beyond the walls. After that, he had kept her near to home, and she had been glad of it. When the orders had been disbanded, she had been content to minister to the poor where she found them and sling substandard hash in a Church-sponsored almshouse. She likely would have done it until she collapsed into the watery stew and powdered potatoes if the orders hadn't been reinstated. She had obeyed the summons only because honor demanded it, and she had been surprised when Priest, who had shown no great affection for her since that day in the shadeless shadow of the hive, had asked for her assignment to his command. Habit and familiarity, she had thought it, an old soldier moved by conscience to protect his own. Now...she wonders.

It doesn't matter. She will go where he leads. It is all she knows, all she has left. Her rosary beads rattle like loose bones against her canteen, and she drops her gaze to the points of her toes and follows them across the miles. _One, one, one, one... Left, right, left, right, left..._ And with every endless, burning mile, the unseen, fleshless fingers at her nape sink ever deeper into her flesh.

She's startled from her meditative reverie by the sudden appearance of a canteen beneath her nose.

"Drink," Priest commands. When she makes no move to take it, he waggles it insistently at her. "Drink."

She accepts the outthrust canteen and unscrews the cap to take an obliging gulp. Wet sand rimes the opening and coats her tongue like ash, but she cannot deny a shiver of relish as the water wets her tongue. She allows herself another swallow and replaces the cap. "My thanks, brother." She returns the canteen to his waiting grasp.

He promptly returns it to its place on his belt. "There's prudence, and then there's stupidity. I've never known you to confuse the two."

"I've never worried for your opinion of me," she retorts. "Besides-" She shrugs. "-I was...preoccupied. This journey has stirred memories."

For a time, neither of them speaks. She listens to the crunch of sand underfoot and the soughing of the breeze through the fabric of their robes. "I have memories, too," he admits at last.

She supposes he does. She does not care to hear them. "I wanted to go back for him. I had this idea that I could give him a proper burial. He deserved that much after all that I had promised him." A mirthless huff of laughter. "I made it as far as the front door, and my legs wouldn't go any farther. I kept trying, kept ordering them to move, once more unto the breach, men, but they just wouldn't. I kept seeing him-kept seeing too much. So I just stood there, clutching the doorknob like a drunk. I don't know how long it took me to go back to bed. I couldn't have found him anyway, not in those tunnels, not in the dark. That's what I tell myself. It's not like the vampires would've left him in his robes for me to find, a gift box from your friendly neighborhood soulless abomination, and one bone is the same as the next. They don't look different because God loves you."

"Sister-" Pained, stricken, and when she chances a sidelong glance from beneath her hood, the fine lines and creases beneath his lovely blue eyes stand in stark relief against his wan skin.

"I was a coward," she says, hard and unforgiving as the lash. "I just didn't want to see what they left of him. I didn't want that image to find its way into my dreams."

"Sister." Pleading now.

Another shrug, the swift, lethal descent of a hatchet. "Now I just wonder if he's burning in Hell."

"Sister!" It's a plaintive cry, and his grip on her forearm is the sudden bite of iron. "Sister, you mustn't think that. You mustn't blame yourself."

"No?" She gently twists her forearm from his grasp. "He was my friend, my sweetest brother, and yet the Church forbids me to grieve for him, to show weakness. I promised him I wouldn't leave him, and yet I left him to die alone in a hole. No comfort, no light, no still, small voice to bring him peace. What then should I do, my brother? Tell me, and I will do it."

"I don't know," he whispers. "But I do know that no good comes of dwelling on it. There's no way to know what became of his soul."

"Isn't there?" she says bitterly. "The Church teaches that those who are infected by the vampires become twisted mockeries of God's divine gift, neither human nor vampire, and it is absolute in its belief that what's left behind is utterly devoid of Grace and wholly undeserving of mercy. It is a damned creation that can only be cleansed by God's judgment, by the bite of silver or the heat of flame. Do you really think they took the time to burn him alive before they tore him apart? They aren't known for their mercy, especially not to priests. Do you know something I don't, brother?" she demands, her voice low and ragged and seething with anguish. "If you do, for God's sake tell me. Do you?" She regards him with dry, throbbing eyes that feel too big for their sockets. "Can you give me that mercy?" 

He has the grace to meet her gaze when the answer comes. "No," he admits. "I can't." The regret in his eyes staggers her with its intensity, and she releases a shuddering breath and a shred of hope she hadn't known she was holding. 

She swallows with a click, saliva gone to scree inside her mouth, and inclines her head. "I thought not," she says, and the words taste of blood. "That would be one miracle too many." Her mouth twitches in a convulsive grimace that threatens to part her lips and release a howl, and she abruptly turns the churning roil of her thoughts to the alien, limitless expanse of the desert beneath her feet and wills her mind to a careful, fragile blankness. "I am ever your tool, Priest, and my legs will follow where you lead, but I cannot speak for my heart."

He nods. "I wish I could, for what it's worth."

"I know. But..." She shrugs again. It's the only movement of which she is capable except for the rise and fall of her legs.

"I know," he echoes, and squeezes her shoulder. The uncharacteristic tenderness surprises her, as do his next words. "And I am sorry."

Then he's gone, returning to his place at the head of the march and the scrape and jostle of a loyal shoulder. Envy burns in her belly, corrosive and galling as alkaline water. She watches him through watering eyes until he is naught but a pinprick in the shimmering heat that rises from the hardpan like Hell's breath, and then she bends her head into the breeze and lets her dusty feet lead her toward the waiting shadow of Sola Mira.


	3. Journeys End In Lovers Meeting

To the human eye, the desert is a barren wasteland, a desolate moonscape of sand and of rock scoured smooth by the same. No animals scurry through the darkness, and the vast expanse is unbroken by so much as a single scrubby sagebrush. The stillness is absolute. Even the wind is absent, and nothing moves beneath the stars that burn, cold and bright, in the night sky.

But his eyes are not human, and he can see the life that skitters and pulses just beneath the surface. He can feel it, too, the minute vibrations of miniscule heartbeats burrowed snugly within the earth. Geckos that radiate febrile warmth like sauna stones. Sidewinders that coil in their lightless, airless holes and flicked forked tongues to taste the threat that crouches above. Mice who cower, whiskers twitching, oildrop eyes bright and glassy inside dismayed faces. Their hearts pound against tiny ribcages, a frenetic rhythm that dances along his sensitive skin like a caress. It's alluring and heady as wine, almost erotic in its sweetness, and he closes his eyes to savor it.

He knows how they would taste, those fluttering hearts. Their like had sustained him for the first bewildered days of his new life, when he'd had yet to shed the bothersome fetters of the old and the thought of killing had tortured his conscience. They had sustained him again when the meddlesome priest had nearly blown him to pieces and sent all the Queen's hard work to screaming, charred ruin. He'd slurped every drop of sustenance from them as he'd crawled across the desert with his flesh in flayed, smoking tatters and his scalp hanging over his face like a caul. He'd snatched and grubbed them from everything that had scuttled within his dying grasp, had swallowed them like cherry pits to soothe his aching belly. They'd given him the strength to drag himself back to the Queen, who had shown mercy to her unworthy servant and nursed him to health by the sweet nectar of her veins.

So choice, so delicate, ripened by fear until they became ambrosia and honeycomb on his tongue. Of course, bigger is better, and if he had his druthers, he would take the bounty offered by coyotes and jackals, whose hearts are thick and firm, apples that drip their crimson juice onto his greedy lips. But coyotes and jackals are kindred spirits of a kind, mercenaries and fellow predators, and they give him and his a wide berth when they scent him on the wind.

Human hearts are choicest and chiefest, rich and succulent and delicious as the finest Kobe beef. Some can be stringy, toughened by years of hard toil, but most are soft and fatty, unctuous and buttery and exquisite. A single human heart can nourish him for days, and he prizes them above all others. They are surprisingly rare, alas, treats he allows himself when his quarry is isolated and there is no one with whom he must share or from whom he must defend his kill, no wild-eyed yokel with terror in his eyes and a rusty pitchfork in his hands in need of correction as to his place in the natural order.

More often than not, he's forced to make do with the blood that courses through their veins, but this he counts as no great sacrifice. It varies in quality; once, he'd had the misfortune of imbibing the squirming, scrabbling offering of the local tosspot and spent the rest of the night and part of the next day trying to scrub the bitter, purulent taste of booze and piss from his teeth, but even that swill was a bounty gladly received. And when it's clean and pure...oh, it's sublime. As he'd once told a pale, pinched Lucy Pace as she'd clutched the arms of her chair and thought to open his throat with the nearby table knife, you'll never have better.

And there is no purer vintage than that of a priest. He never would have imagined it to be so, given how cruelly the Church drives them beneath its pious, goading lash. Indeed, given all that they are asked to endure in the name of cowardice and the overweening, authoritarian arrogance of the elders, he would have thought them all but inedible, gristle and sinew and sour pith. But it seems that a life of abstinence and unrelenting suffering was good for something after all, because he'd never tasted finer. He still remembers the warm, honeyed smoothness of it as it sluiced down his throat, cordial and mulled wine. More than he could hope to drink, and he'd glutted himself while the rest of the Queen's children had wiped the simpering, mewling inhabitants of Jericho from the face of the earth while their shabby pretensions to safety and civilization burned to ash around them. The hearts he'd kept, and though they had been on the chewy side, he'd never been more invigorated, and he'd felt a pang of true loss when he'd swallowed the last as bite of jerky a week later.

_Ask and ye shall receive,_ he muses wryly as he gazes down at the figures in the shallow arroyo from his vantage point on a small outcropping. Twenty, give or take a few, and three of them are priests. They're clustered around a trio of fires banked low. A few of them are awake and staring meditatively into the glowing embers, but most are huddled beneath patchwork bedrolls. He sees the glint of wary watchful eyes, voles peering fearfully from the illusory safety of their blankets. The rest are asleep, curled into balls as they dream, rosaries clutched in their fists.

He chuckles softly. _Didn't you tell them, Priest?_ he wonders. _Didn't you warn them that those trinkets are useless?_ Of course he didn't. Priest had never been a man of many words, and he'd been even more sparing with the truth. He'd never told those who followed him just how bad they worst could get when the light fled the sky and left them to the pitiless, silver glow of the moon. He'd certainly never told them what waited for them in the dark heart of Sola Mira. If he had, they might have refused the order, desires of the safely-cloistered Church Fathers be damned. That circumstances had worked to his advantage had been a matter of pure happenstance; had the Queen not been of a merciful mind and in the mood for a bit of fortuitous experimentation, he would be just another jumble of moldering bones crumbling beneath the effluvium of the hive.

If he had, _she_ would have ignored his order to remain behind like a puling child. She would have followed him. She would have held on until her fingers wrenched from the joints and her shoulder dislocated, and if he had slipped from her grasp, she would have tumbled down after him, Jill to his plummeting Jack. She would not have left him to face the darkness alone, deserted him to save herself, and perhaps he wouldn't be facing all the ages of the world alone.

_You hate him for that just as much as you do for him letting you go. He could have let her come, would have on any other raid, but that night, his strategy changed, and with it, the course of your life. He had lived his life, had known love and passion and all the attendant pleasures of desire. He had created the family denied you by the will of the Church, who cared nothing for your loneliness, or for the aspirations you had cherished before they came calling with their cassocks and their gilt-paged Bibles and their iron rods. They smothered those dreams beneath the suffocating mantle of higher duty and greater purpose, and then they bled you and broke your bones until they bent you to their self-serving whims and reshaped you into someone who bore no resemblance to whom you might have been._

_She could have given you that life. Before that night, you'd begun to see the faintest ray of light on the horizon. The number of vampires had begun to dwindle, and most of your ops were mop-ups. You'd begun to dream of life after the blood and horror of war. You wanted to ask her to come with you, to follow you as faithfully in civilian life as she had when you were scrabbling over ridges and descending blindly into caves with unseen bottoms. You had high hopes for the answer, and you allowed yourself to dream for the first time since your aborted boyhood. A quiet life of scholarship--a book-binder or a theologian. A wife with an occupation of her own. Children. A boy with sturdy legs and a girl with hair the color of summer sunshine and her mother's stubborn streak and sly, impish grin. A life of peace, if not plenty, and one made on your own terms._

_And then he lied and tore it all from you with the simmering, scalding friction of uncoupling hands._

_You thought of her often down there in the dark while the Queen's ravenous children sank their fangs into your flesh and lapped the blood from the cuts they scored in it with their clittering, diseased claws. You thought for a while that she would come for you once she realized that you hadn't come back with the others, and you listened for the sounds of her stealthy footfalls as she prowled through the tunnels on her nimble, feline feet to wrest you from their clammy clutches. But the only sounds were the drip of condensation from the dank cavern walls and the tenebrous, avian rustle of scaled feet as they clambered over the rocks and slithered into the surrounding crevices like burrowing parasites._

_You called for her when you still had a voice, shrieked and sobbed her secret name when they sank their godless teeth into your belly and flicked their gelid tongues against your ribs. You were so sure that she would come, just as she had always done before, drawn by your keening entreaties and driven by a loyalty stronger than the bloodless, crushing grasp of the Church and the dubious sanctity of the chain of command, but no matter how urgently you called, fingers stretched tremulously toward the faint light at the entrance to the tunnel, the woman who had promised you as children that she would never leave you had not come. You had been abandoned for true and for the last time. You let your hand fall and stopped crying for her and for God and succumbed to the languid torpor of approaching death._

_The twilight between life and death was a peaceful haze, a lurid dream from which you had no desire to awaken. There was neither pain nor terror there, and you wandered through a patchwork of cherished memories and quietly-nurtured fantasies. You held your father's callused, work-roughened hand and smelled the sweat that beaded on his reddened nape and tasted your mother's bread, fresh and yeasty and full of oats and poppies. You smelled the water from the river, mud and reeds and bright spring grass, and felt the mud squelch between your bare toes. You scaled fish that glinted silver as they flopped on the riverbank and savored the earthy, flaky sweetness of them as you ate them from a tin plate. You saw your mother's smile again and the glossy darkness of her hair and felt her fingers as they carded through yours with wistful, maternal fondness._

_And you were with her, of course. You chased her along the riverbank while she laughed, head thrown back and golden hair flying behind her. You caught her and buried your nose in her hair and the sensitive crook of her neck, and she laughed when you drew your lips over the nautilus of her ear. You fed her the fish from your lines and your mother's bread, and she savored them both. You danced with her in the shade of a young oak and brushed the wedding rice from her hair with reverent fingertips and kissed her pliant, pink lips. You loved her beneath that same tree in the cool starlight, and in the autumn, while the leaves of the oak burned and fluttered to the earth like scarlet embers, her belly grew round and ripe and full of promise beneath her shift._

_You thought you saw her, a shadow looming above your unfocused eyes, and you would have reached for her if you'd had the strength, but the Queen's children had nearly sucked you dry, and you could only sprawl upon your stone tomb and swallow the bitter blackness that dripped down your slack throat. Immortality and salvation tasted of pitch and gall._

_You told the Queen of her once you had gained your strength and begun to master the limitless possibility of your reforged flesh. Nothing was hidden from her gaze, embedded as she was within your mind. Her voice was a constant whisper in your head, and unseen fingers deftly unraveled your mind and plumbed its secrets. She saw the glimmer of her in the deepest recess of your mind and plucked her from you like gold from bedrock. Bright as flame and diamond fire, and she held it before her pupiless, obsidian eyes in astonishment._

This is the greatest desire of your heart? _she mused, and turned it in a lazy, contemplative circle._

My only wish is to serve you, my Queen, _you answered meekly, ever the dutiful servant, though you served a new and more gracious master._

_She threw back her head and laughed, and it resounded inside your head like the tolling of a bell._ And yet you desire her?

Yes.

_She lowered her hand._ Not only obedient, but forthright, too. _The mingling of memory and wish lay in her palm like a strand of golden thread._ If you promise to serve me, my child, then you may have her. _She cupped your cheek with one three-fingered hand._ So much needless suffering, _she crooned._ Let your suffering be at an end. Find your love. Sow your seed and live the life our enemies have denied you. So long as she does not interfere with my plans, she will have a place in our new world.

_You wanted to find her right away, but the Queen, for all her compassion, had many tasks for you, and as days passed into weeks and then into months, the impulse faded. You were consumed with the business of faithful servitude, and there was little time to search for her. The cities were closed to you, well-protected by your former brethren, and the still small voice of the man you had been whispered with fervid insistence that it would be a search made in vain. She had not come when you had cried out in the frightened agonies of your rebirth, and only death could have kept her from you. She had perished long ago, a casualty of your brother's arrogance or incompetence. Or perhaps she lay at the entrance to the tunnels, skeletal hands stretched toward the tunnel that had served as your second womb. Either way, she was gone, and there was no use in seeking for her. Better to do the Queen's bidding and in so doing avenge yourself upon the man who had torn her from you._

_And then you met the ghost of your past on the road to Damascus, and all the buried memories rose to the surface. The cassock once as intimate as your own flesh, the cross whose faint outline was still etched into your forehead, the rosary that dangled from his fist like a hank of entrails--each of them stirred recollections of she who had once owned your heart. The aching longing for what could never be returned with a vengeance, blinding and consuming as the need for sustenance. You wanted to seize him by the throat and wring her whereabouts from him before you squeezed the life from him and left him to rot beneath the desert sun. An eye for an eye and a life for a life. Justice._

_But then that pining bitch who followed in his wake with dampened panties had wrenched a miracle from her miserly God and blown your carefully-laid plains to pieces. You were enveloped by fire and left for dead, and you were too weak and wracked by pain to look for her, Besides, as you lay in the cool, sheltering sanctuary of the hive with your blackened skin sloughing from your body in oozing patches, you told yourself that she would turn from you in horror, disgusted by what you had become._

Well, now the tide has turned. The mercy of the Queen has made him whole again, unblemished and strong, and Providence has led him here, to an isolated arroyo where his adversary and his fawning whore think to catch him unawares.

_Well, aren't they in for a surprise?_ he thinks as he watches his brother stare at a fellow priest sitting cross-legged beneath a small overhang, and smiles. 

It's insulting, really, that they would think to come for him with this ragtag group of untested acolytes. Many of them are little more than children, scrawny boys with peachfuzz on their chins and girls barely grown into their bodies. Was he ever so young, so fragile? He must have been. The Church had swept him up as a child who still played with rust-spotted tin soldiers and wooden horses. But even the Church had never been so callous as to send him into the breach when he was still a child shivering in the throes of puberty and wrangling with the desires and urges the Church said he must suppress and forget as a devout child of God.

_Perhaps its circumstances are more dire than we thought,_ he muses with satisfaction. _I did send three of their best and brightest to Hell in Jericho, and now that I think on it, they did look a little worse for wear. They were sloppy, too. Chin practically showboated before I ripped his heart out. That's not something he ever would have done before. He was too careful, too disciplined. And yet, there he was, flourishing his blades like a child playing war with his friends. Maybe they're just tired of fighting, or maybe they've just gotten careless and complacent, sure that the threat is over._

There are the fires, too, bright as beacons in the darkness. A trained priest knows better than to allow fires in open country. The light attracts attention, and not just vampires. Coyotes and mongrel dogs, too. Yet here they sit, three dying fires throwing perversely cheerful light over the figures clustered around their dwindling warmth. 

He clucks his tongue. "Obsession has made you careless, brother," he murmurs to himself.

_It could be a trap._

He rocks back on his heels, careful not to disturb the scree that litters his perch, and sinks even lower upon his haunches, his buttocks nearly scraping the ground. He turns his head a fraction and hisses through his teeth, one eye on the figures below.

A soldier scuttles forward with sinuous, reptilian grace, fingers splayed in the dry earth. _Yes?_ it asks inside his head, and cocks its eyeless face in wordless inquiry.

_Are you sure there are no others?_

_Yes. Just these._ It turns its flat nose to the sky and sniffs.

_Just to be sure, take a small squad and search the surrounding area for the next mile. I don't want any surprises._

It inclines its head in acknowledgment and turns upon its own stubbed tail to carry out his order. He watches until half a dozen forms vanish, rising over the rocks like smoke, and then he speaks to the others. _The rest of you fan out. Surround them. No exits, no chance for escape. Tonight, we feast on the blood of priests._

A jubilant howl rises in his head, and jubilation surges in his veins, dark and heady as lust. It is triumph and victory, and he exults in it, eyes closed and fangs glistening. _No more humiliation for us, brothers, no more shame. Tonight, we break them._

Another howl, and then they disperse, grains of sand scattered to the winds. He watches them until the last has disappeared even from his view, and then he returns his attention to the pitiful scattering of his would-be conquerors. More of them are sleeping now. Indeed, only the priests remain awake, and he can hardly call them vigilant. His former brother stands beside his faithful fetch, at half-hearted attention with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, but his eyes are not trained upward, scanning the ridge for signs of movement. Rather, they are fixed on the third priest, who still sits beneath the overhang, head turned toward the entrance to the hive.

_You seem preoccupied, brother,_ he notes as the seated figure rolls a strand of rosary beads in their palm. _If I didn't know better, I'd say you were worried. What is it that's gotten your attention, hmm? Are they weak, working wounded and nursing wounds beneath concealed bandages? Are they young, eighteen and with the ink of the cross still glistening wetly on their raw forehead? Are they unsuited, a subpar initiate into your dying brotherhood?_

He edges forward, the better to study the solitary figure. Their face is lost to the shadows and folds of their hood, but he can see that they're thin, almost scrawny. The robes hang slackly on their frame, and the cross of their rosary lies in the dirt, unheeded as they stare into the distance.

"Such irreverence," he tuts. _The holy standards are really slipping._

_It could be a woman,_ a voice suggests.

Oh, now _there_ was a delicious possibility. He'd never counted his fusty brother as a Lothario, but these are changing times, and a man has needs, no matter what the perpetual virgins of the Church say. 

_Is that why you're staring with such intensity, my brother? Is there a woman beneath all that fabric who's finally turned the eyes of your heart in a way that the perpetual shadow at your feet never could? It would certainly explain why Priestess Khara looks so dour and harried despite her attempts at meditation. Jealousy is quite the distraction. Have you partaken, or does it remain a desire yet unfilled? It burns, doesn't it, to want what you can never have? It's a torment greater than death to be so close and yet forbidden to touch and taste and caress. I lived with it from the moment I came into manhood--years spent with my hunger burning in my bones like disease, my weakness pulsing against her sleeping flesh. I committed the sin of Onan behind rocks and in the barracks shower just to preserve meaningless vows penned by withered old men whose own passions had long since been satisfied. It is a death renewed with every agonizing breath, every incidental brush of a hand. It is Hell on this side of the firmament, and I hope it devours you._

"Sister," Priest calls softly, but the figure does not turn. In fact, it does not stir at all.

_Ah, so it is a woman._ He grins, lupine and predatory. It's a pity he won't be able to watch this little domestic drama play out. It would be an interesting diversion from the grinding gravity of the hunt.

The soldier materializes from the night, creeping soundlessly on its taloned feet, a submissive dog presenting itself for the approval of its master. _There are no others,_ it reports.

That's good. That's very good. _Are you in position?_ he calls to the others.

_Yes,_ comes the chorusing, sibilant reply, the surreptitious murmur of the wind through the long-forgotten river grasses of his childhood home.

He dusts his palms on the knees of his jeans, and then he leaps to the arroyo floor.

Priest whirls in surprise, and his faithful fetch follows suit, unsheathing a long, silver blade.

"Hello, brother," he says as the others begin to stir, rubbing sleep from their eyes and scrambling to their feet. The nearest acolyte aims a blow at the side of his face, but it is easily avoided, and he grabs the offending fists and squeezes until the bones crack and grind. The boy--and he is a boy, no more than sixteen--screams and crumples, wounded hand cradled to his chest. "Children?" he sneers. "You think so little of me that you come after me with a band of children?" He steps on the whimpering child and grinds his booted heel into his ribs until he writhes. "Oh, you must be truly desperate."

A muscle twitches in Priest's jaw, and his eyes blaze inside his face, but he doesn't attack. He stands his ground, hands fisted at his sides. Priestess curls her lip and brandishes her sword, but she holds, a tiger coiling to spring.

"What are you waiting for?" He beckons them forward with both hands. "Come on, Priest. Finish what you started when I took Daddy's little girl."

Priest growls and tenses, but he doesn't advance. His eyes shift to the left and the Priestess beneath the overhang. She, too, has risen to her feet, but there is no fight in her, no sense of threat. She's staring at him from beneath her hood, swaying dreamily on unsteady legs. He can hear her breathing, rapid and ragged and pained, as though she were wracked with debilitating cramps. Her heartbeat is a frenetic, constant roll of thunder.

He laughs. "This is in whom you have placed your faith? I'm afraid you're going to be sorely disappointed." His amusement only deepens when she sinks to her knees and drops her rosary into the dust. She pitches forward, palms pressed into the dirt, and rests her forehead in the sand. He shakes his head. "Your great defender bows at my feet."

The priestess raises her head, and from the depths of her hood comes a name he had thought never to hear again. "Johannes?" Faint, a prayer whispered behind folded hands.

His heart seizes inside his chest, and his hand drifts out to brush the hood from her head. Golden hair and blue eyes, and suddenly, he's eight years old and staring into a tear-stained face while the priest at his bare back demonstrates God's love with every stroke of the lash.

Her mouth works, and she raises a dirty hand to skim the fingertips that still hover above her head. "H-,?"

"Let me guess: he told you I was dead."

A strangled, thwarted sob escapes her, and she nods. The tears, so familiar, stream down her face.

"Of course he did." He strokes her temple. _He's as hard as his masters. He let you suffer for all this time just to avoid the truth. My Liese, what have they done to you?_ She's far too thin, and almost feverish beneath his hand. "Did he tell you that he let me go? He could have saved me, could've brought me back to you, but he let me go to save himself. I was alive for days down there, weeks."

She keens and rocks back on her knees. She's panting with the effort of smothering her grief, but it's in every line of her face, and her heart is pounding so hard that she's vibrating with the force of it.

"Shhh," he soothes. "It's all right, Liese." He caresses her wet cheek. "It's all right. Come with me." He holds out his hand.

"Don't listen to him," Priestess urges. 

"And why shouldn't she?" he asks. "I've already shown him for a liar. I'm not dead."

"You're an abomination," she snarls. To Liese, she says, "Sister, think. He's been turned, polluted by the vampire taint. Look at him."

Liese peers at him from her knees. Her eyes widen when she sees the white glint of his fangs and the amber of his eyes, but she doesn't recoil from his touch.

"I've changed," he admits. "But it's for the better. I'm faster now, stronger, and I recover from wounds that would kill an ordinary man. Priest here tried to blow me up, but after a few weeks, I was right as rain."

"And how much blood?" Priestess demands.

"A man does what he can to survive. Especially when his so-called friends abandon him to torment and death."

Liese utters another muffled cry.

He almost misses it. He's so focused on Priestess that he doesn't see Priest creeping in from the side, silver cross at the ready. But Liese does, and her expressive eyes give him a last-minute warning. He steps to the side and pivots, and Priest stumbles past, sharpened cross outthrust. He spins and regains his balance and prepares for another charge, but before he can close the distance, the vampires on the ridge descend in a shrieking tide.

Liese rolls and rises to her feet and withdraws a pair of silver scythes from a scabbard at her back. They glow in the moonlight, slender and lethal and lovely, and then she brings them down on the neck of an advancing vampire. Blood splashes to the thirsty earth in a gouting spray of obsidian, and the body collapses and twitches before dissolving into dust. She spins and impales another and twists the blade free with ruthless efficiency, and then she steps right and sweeps the other blade through the throat of a third.

"Liese, stop!" he commands, and she turns to him in confusion, but before she can either comply or defy him and seal her regrettable fate, a vampire launches itself at her and knocks her to the ground. One scythe flies from her grasp and spins beyond her reach, but the other remains in her grip, and she rolls through the attack and mounts the soldier, who squirms and bucks between her thighs. It's perversely erotic, and he watches, mesmerized, as she raises the blade like a shard of moonlight and drives it into its throat.

Then an acolyte is rushing him with upraised dagger, and he tears his gaze from the dark loveliness in front of him and devotes himself to the glorious harvest of blood. He recoils, a snake eluding the grasp of an impertinent hand, and spins to his adversary's flank, where he seizes a handful of dark hair and yanks until he's rewarded with the muffled crack of bone. He's met by a pair of glassy, brown eyes that roll in their sockets. "It's not what you thought it was, huh, kid?" he says, and plunges his fangs into his bobbing throat.

He groans in ecstasy as his prey thrashes and gurgles and the blood sluices over his tongue and down his throat in a hot freshet, sticky and sweet as mulled wine, He feeds until the flow slows to a sluggish trickle, and then he laps the last drops from the ragged wound. The body sags limply in his grip, so much worthless, infirm flesh, and he lets the husk drop. His soldiers will claim the rest. He licks his lips in satisfaction as he searches for his next victim. Not as fine a vintage as that of a priest, but invigorating nonetheless, and every acolyte killed is one less priest to oppose him later.

The battle is a blur of blood and bone. The ribs of a young acolyte disintegrate beneath a blow, and for just a moment before an overzealous soldier wrenches her from him and sinks its fangs into her throat, her heart flutters against his fingertips. He licks the blood from beneath his nails, frosting scraped from the bowl of a decadent torte, and steps on the throat of a fallen acolyte until it buckles.

_Disappointing, this crop,_ he muses as he watches a young woman with dark hair fall beneath a swarm of soldiers. _We would've fared much better._

As though to prove his point, his former brother fells three soldiers with a spray of silver throwing crosses. Arms outstretched and feet tucked in a graceful crouch as he reaches for another. It's beautiful, a dance with which he is intimately familiar, and he's seized by a wave of wistful nostalgia.

_I loved you once,_ he thinks sadly. _We could have been brothers again if you had only taken my hand._

He applauds the display of fluid dexterity. "Well done, brother," he says, "But then, you were always good at this part of our holy calling."

Priest whirls to face him and hurls a cross at him. It misses him by scant inches, hissing past his cheek to embed itself into unseen flesh behind him. "Friend or foe, brother?" he goads.

Priest only snarls, face contorted by loathing.

He shakes his head. "Oh, brother," he says ruefully, "Are you still consumed by blind hatred?"

"You tried to kill my daughter!"

He grins. "Now, that's hardly fair. I had her on my train for nearly a week and never touched a hair on her sheltered, haughty little head. I could've killed her at any time, made her one of my pets. You mistake my motives. Maybe I just wanted the company of a pretty girl. A man gets lonely in the desert."

Priest lunges, lips peeled from his teeth in a savage snarl.

He retreats a pace, grinning. "Careful." He chuckles. "One of your ladies in waiting might mistake you for one of mine."

Priestess is over Priest's left flank, severing the head of a young soldier. Black blood and sweat fleck her face, and she looks inhuman in the moonlight. And Liese...

He laughs, a low rumble of genuine pleasure. Liese is dancing on the wind, scythe held aloft like a shining scepter. Her cassock billows around her, and her hair is a golden veil. She is a fragile goddess of silver and gold, and as her scythe descends to deal a killing blow, he loves her in spite of her sin, covets her with the ravenous want of a man too long denied.

_My Liese,_ he thinks longingly. _My precious glory._

She catches sight of him as she drifts on the wind in defiance of gravity, borne up by the angels. Her lips curve in a fond, tremulous smile.

And then she plummets as a soldier vaults from the arroyo wall and crashes into her.

_No!_ he screams as the soldier looms over her crumpled form and howls in triumph. _No! Not her! Leave her!_ he cries as he runs towards them, but the soldier is too far gone in its bloodlust to obey, and it pins her to the ground with one taloned claw. He wills her to move, to struggle, but she lies still as death upon the earth as the soldier lowers its dripping jaws.

He closes the distance with a flying leap and swats the soldier aside just as its fangs graze her throat. The bewildered soldier tumbles and rolls in the earth, long limbs flailing as it struggles to right itself. It shakes the cobwebs from its ringing skull and fixes him with an expression of wounded consternation.

_Not her, I said,_ he barks. _She's mine._

The soldier shies from him with a low whine, a dog scolded by an intemperate master, and skulks away. When it has rejoined the fray and diverted itself with a screaming acolyte clutching his exposed entrails in one bloody hand, he turns to Liese, who lies sprawled at his feet.

He drops to his knees beside her. _I can't lose her again, not when fate has given me this unexpected chance._ He brushes the hair from her face. This close, he can hear her heartbeat, slow and steady in his ears and along his skin, and he sags with relief.

She stirs at his touch and opens her eyes with an effort. "Johannes," she croaks, and winces at a sudden flare of pain.

"Ssh, I've got you," he murmurs. He's not sure how badly she's injured, but she's pale as milk, and he can smell bloody wool. It's rich and sweet and alluring, the promise of holy elixir, and he steels himself against the instinct to sink his fangs into her throat like an ardent lover.

_It's Liese,_ he reminds himself as the smell permeates his nostrils and tempts him to cruel hypocrisy. _It's my sweetest sister. I've waited so long for this._

_She left you to die, took your faithless brother at his word and never came back for you,_ hisses the bitter voice of recrimination. _You cried out for her, and she never came._

She blinks at him. "Are you real?" she asks, and her breath hitches at another stab of pain. "If you're going to kill me, brother, do it quickly. I won't fight you. I'm too tired." Fingers that had once soothed the sting from chafed wrists curl around that same flesh, and his skin prickles in recognition. 

That decides him. He gathers her in his arms, dismayed at her lightness and the boneless loll of her in his embrace, and carries her toward the ridge. He needs to take her home, to the seclusion of his cabin a few miles beyond the hive. There is food there, and shelter, and a place to assess her injuries and begin the work of turning her to his cause. A place to begin his courtship and indulge in baser pleasures of which he has dreamed since he slept with his prick tucked against the swell of her ass. 

_It might be an easier matter than you think,_ says the giddy and too-rarely-heard voice of optimism inside his head. _Her reaction when you dropped that little bombshell was priceless. She knows him for a liar and a traitor now. You can use that to your advantage, prod that wound until it weeps and cries for vengeance. It might take patience and time, but you have both in plenty, and if you succeed, the rewards will be beyond your wildest imaginings. One priest turned from the path nearly toppled the kingdom of mankind. Two would see it burn and dance among the ruins._

She stirs against him, whimpering softly. "I think I cracked a rib."

_You're lucky that's all you cracked as far as you fell._ "I don't mean to hurt you, sister, but it can't be helped. I don't have time for tenderness." _Much as I wish to display it._

He turns to survey his foes. Priestess is beset by two of his most zealous soldiers and has no chance to reach him before he gains the ridge and the winding path to the hive, but Priest is much closer and gaining quickly, cutting a jagged, bloody swathe through his troops.

_Concentrate on the Priest,_ he commands his soldiers. _Kill him if you can, but keep him out of my way until I reach the hive. Kill his bitch, too, if the opportunity presents itself, but if it doesn't, get clear as soon as you can. No use in taking unnecessary casualties. I don't need martyrs. I just need time._

There is an answering cry from his soldiers, an eerie, collective baying that silences all other sound. The priests, too, are momentarily stunned, frozen in postures of desperate fight. Priestess' mouth opens in dismay, and Priest blinks and shakes his head as though to clear it. Comprehension dawns, and he turns to pursue, but his soldiers are faithful, and they throw themselves into his path and cling to his arms and ankles. Still, the priest advances, wading through the clawing, tugging, screeching horde with grim determination.

"Good luck, brother," he calls jauntily, and then he takes a deep breath and leaps for the top of the ridge.

The subsequent landing jars Liese's abused ribs, and she groans in miserable protest.

"It's not far now," he soothes. "Just hold on, and I promise you, it's the last pain you'll ever know."

She chuckles, soft and exhausted. "I'm not that lucky," she mumbles, and turns her face into the pliant leather of his duster jacket with a shuddering snuffle.

His long, tireless strides eat up the distance and the desert sand, and it isn't long before he reaches the entrance to the hive. A pair of sentry drones greet him, noses pressed to the earth, and he acknowledges them with a flick of his eyes. He doesn't stop until he's inside and enveloped by the cool, damp shadows. Even if Priest were dogged enough to follow him here, he would get no further. The walls and ceiling are crawling with vampires. Not the teeming thousands that had dwelt here before the ill-fated assault on the city, but certainly enough to ensure that no priest would escape their wrath, and the hive guardian rumbles and shuffles in the subterranean deep, ever on guard against unwanted interlopers or unwary prey. It's young and unseasoned yet, but it carries the knowledge of its predecessor in its blood, and it will not hesitate to devour their enemies.

_It'll devour her if you're not careful, a hound swallowing a rawhide bone whole._

So will the others. They've caught her scent, tasted her blood on the air, and he can hear their growing excitement as they shift and scuttle along the walls, the agitated clicking of their jaws. Prey. Food. Offering.

"She's not to be touched," he says, and his proclamation echoes in the cavernous chamber. "Not until the Queen determines her fate."

"The queen?" she slurs. "Johannes?" She squirms in his arms with feeble, drugged alarm. 

"Ssh," he says gently. "Peace, Liese." When she continues to struggle, he asks, "Do you trust me?"

She stills, breath harsh and thin in an effort to spare her ribs. "Yes," she says.

_She's either a fool or a goddess,_ muses a wry voice inside his head.

He ignores it, heart swollen with triumph and pride. _Still mine, then._

He sets her on her feet with assiduous care. She sways and staggers, hand pressed to her side, and he reaches out to steady her. The smell of blood is stronger now, redolent, and his stomach rumbles greedily.

"I can't carry you through the tunnels. They're too low."

She says nothing. Her gaze travels around the corridor with dreamy slowness, and she lists dangerously, one leg threatening to buckle entirely. "Sola Mira." She steadies herself for moment but begins to reel and wobble again almost at once. "Sola Mira," she repeats, and her voice cracks beneath the weight of old grief. "This is where they left you," she moans. Her chest begins to hitch, and her eyes are wet. "This is where they left you t-to t-" Her mouth works soundly. 

"Liese," he barks, and squeezes her arm until she gasps. "Liese, we have to go. They know you're here, and I won't be able to stop them forever. Not when you're bleeding."

She gapes at him in logy incomprehension. "Mm?"

He seizes her by the hand and leads her down the narrow, winding tunnel through which he had come to salvation and revelation. She staggers after him, her breath coming in pained, ragged gasps. The scent of blood is closer here, a sweet torment, and he breathes through his mouth to blunt its pernicious edge.

"Take solace in your God if it will make it easier," he says as he stoops to pass through a particularly narrow section of tunnel. The top of his hat scrapes the ceiling, and dirt rains down upon him.

She says nothing, but she squeezes his hand in acknowledgment, and soon, her gait steadies and her breathing eases. He loosens his grip, but doesn't release it, and she threads her fingers through his in a gesture of unthinking affection that makes his throat burn. He's missed her, missed this, and he'd long since given up hope of finding such connection again. The vampires accepted him because the Queen demanded it and respected him for his skills, but they do not love him, and if he were to fall in service to their cause, they would not mourn him as anything other than a valuable asset lost. In that, at least, they and his former brotherhood are of a mind.

But Liese has always loved him, not because of his utility to the glorious cause of humanity, but simply because.. She loves him because he is Johannes, a boy who should have grown up on the riverbank with mud cool and wet between his bare toes. She loves him because he likes the wind in his hair and the oily aroma of fresh fish on his hands. She loves him because he had defied their masters and remained steadfastly himself in the secret cloister of his heart even as he had paid superficial obeisance to their bloodless, crumbling doctrines of privation and lifelong loneliness. She loves him simply because he is, and that is a gift as precious as the immortality bestowed upon him by his gracious Queen.

_No more loneliness,_ he thinks. _No more nights alone, no more wandering in the wilderness._

_At least until age and the frailty of mortal flesh steal her from you._

They wouldn't. He would turn her, make her see. She would join him in the bliss of eternal life, and they would spend the ages of the world together, exalted among vampires and progenitors of a superior race that would go forth and multiply and hold dominion over the earth.

_And if you cannot convince her?_

Then he would compel her, force her lips to the font if he must. She would resist, and perhaps she would hate him for a time, as he had hated the brotherhood who had deserted him to his fate and the Queen who had remade him in her own sublime image, but it would be fleeting, the temperamental paroxysm of an adolescent clinging to the last vestiges of childhood. Once the sting of betrayal faded, she would come to appreciate his momentary tyranny. And he would have all of eternity to earn her pardon.

"Where are we going?" Clear and curious, though he can hear the pain just beneath the surface.

_The opiate of the masses did its job well,_ he notes with wry amusement. "Home."

"You don't live here?"

A soft huff. "No. I prefer the sun. I've lived too long in the dark." _And so have you._

"Is it safe to stop for a drink of water?"

"There's a place up ahead where we'll be able to stand," he answers, and presses on.

It's another half-mile before the passage opens into a small, snug cave festooned with lichen and mushrooms that sprout from the dank walls like tumors and shallow outcroppings that offer respite from the march. The path resumes on the other side, and he's tempted to renege on his unspoken promise and keep going, but her breathing has grown harsh again, and her fingers are slick with sweat, and so he draws to a stop and falls back to guide her to the sturdiest outcropping.

She collapses onto it, arm wrapped around her middle in a makeshift brace. Her other hand fumbles for the canteen at her belt. She's pale and pinched, and the hair at her temples is damp with sweat.

"You sure you've only got a cracked rib?" He presses the back of his hand to her forehead, but finds no fever.

"My side burns." She grimaces as she uncaps her canteen.

"Let me see."

"Let me wet my tongue first." She lifts the canteen to her lips and takes a long, convulsive swallow. He's transfixed by the greedy, peristaltic pull of her throat and keenly aware of her pulsepoint as it flutters in its sensitive hollow.

_Tart and sweet as pomegranate seeds_ he thinks, and the longing is a savage cramp in his gut. He tears his gaze from the tantalizing sight and fixes it on her knees.

She drains the canteen and gives it a forlorn shake. "Empty," she says ruefully, and lowers it to her lap.

"There'll be all the water you can drink once we get to the cabin."

"A cabin?" She titters.

He drops to his haunches in front of her and shifts over his toes. "Now, let me see."

His gently patting hands find a wet, sticky rent in the fabric of her cassock, and upon closer inspection, he discovers four jagged claw marks of equal length that run from just below her floating rib to behind her hip. He gingerly peels the tacky, sodden wool from the edges of the wounds, which gape and contract like toothless mouths with every breath. Not fatal, from the looks of them, but painful as hell, especially when compounded by the jostle and bulge of a cracked rib, and if he doesn't tend them soon, they'll be festering with infection.

_Just one taste,_ wheedles the voice of his hunger with the desperate, single-minded intensity of the addict. _She's too weak to stop you, and as long as you don't use your fangs, no harm will come to her. She will remain your Liese, young and lovely and headstrong. She can still be your helpmeet and eternal companion. Consider it the first act of your joyful union._

His lips are so close, a dizzying hairsbreadth from a nectar as divine as ambrosia and rose. All he has to do is part his lips and extend his tongue, and he will know God more intimately and completely than he ever had when he had bowed and scraped before His self-appointed prophets as a starving, frightened, loveless child in search of a family. 

Fingers come to rest upon his nape, soft and cool, a wordless benediction. "I have missed you so, brother," she murmurs, and cards them through the hair at his nape.

He resists the urge to purr with the pleasure of it and bury his head in the folds of her cassock. Instead, he picks up her other hand and presses a kiss to the center of her palm. "Come on. It's not far now, and I can put out the fire in your side."

She rises with a grimace and totters for a moment as fatigue and vertigo threaten to overwhelm her, and then she follows him into the next labyrinthine tunnel, eyes half-lidded against the slaloming walls and seesawing ground. Down and down into the forgotten tombs of the desert, past the bones of beasts and kings of old whose legacies had been erased from memory. Now and then, she reaches out to steady herself against his back when the terrain threatens to upset her failing equilibrium, and his skin burns at her touch, holy water and frustrated desire. 

Eventually, the slope begins to climb, and after a mile of treading the upward path, the claustrophobic darkness is pierced by shafts of muted, grey light that slant through the splintered slats of dilapidated, wooden boards. "We're here," he calls over his shoulder, and strides forward to pluck a solitary plank from its place near the outer wall and jam it through the widest gap in the center. He thrusts it upward and applies pressure until he's rewarded with the stolid thump of tumbling lumber.

He replaces the impromptu lever and pushes open the rough-hewn doors. The murky light of dawn oozes in, milk reflected in the polished gloss of a silver saucer. The moon hangs low and drowsy in the sky, and the horizon is pink with the first rosy blush of a new day. It's melancholy and ephemeral as the lace of a bride's veil, and he wishes he could capture it in his fist like a wisp of morning fog. He draws it into his lungs instead and holds it there until an agreeable ache blossoms in the center of his chest. Then he releases it on a slow exhale and steps out of the tunnel, Lazarus emerging from his sepulcher. Liese follows, squinting against the wan light.

"Home sweet home," he says, and urges her forward with a grandiloquent sweep of his arm.

She shuffles toward the small cabin ten yards distant. She's spent now, propelled by habit and bloody-mindedness, and even those will fail her soon. "You live here?" she says, and peers at it with tired, bloodshot eyes.

"I'm not home much," he admits as he sweeps her into his arms again. "But on the rare occasion that I am, this is where I hang my hat."

"Did you build it?" Her words are soft at the edges.

He chuckles. "You credit me too much. No, it was abandoned by the previous tenants." He sees no need to tell her that those tenants are so many jumbled bones in the compost heap, or that the teenage boy whose room she would be occupying had pissed his pants while his lifeblood had pumped into his mouth in spurting, obscene spurts. "Besides, you know I was always more a fisher of men than a carpenter," he teases, and she giggles deliriously.

He carries her across the pathetic scrap of yard and up the creaking steps in dire need of replacement. He shifts her in the cradle of his arms so that he can grip the tarnished brass doorknob, and when the tumbler releases, he nudges it wide with an impatient bump of his shoulder. Then he carries her across the threshold, a bridegroom with his beloved, and kicks the door shut behind him.

The noise brings a familiar from its room adjacent to the kitchen, a pallid creature with eyes the color of peat and teeth that smell of carrion and contagion. The former light up at the sight of the bundle in his arms, and it scampers forward with servile eagerness.

"A gift, master?" it simpers, and a mottled tongue emerges from between fleshless lips like a straining, necrotic prick.

"No," he snarls, and bares his fangs in feral warning.

It shrinks from him in terror. "Forgive me, master," it whines, and cowers. "I only thought-"

"You thought nothing," he snaps, and its pasty, hairless head bobs in hasty agreement. "She is not to be touched."

"As you say, master," it answers with fawning deference, and retreats a few paces to demonstrate its earnestness.

"Bring me any bandages we have and the needle and thread. And a basin of hot water, some cloths, and the medicinal brandy."

The hairless head bobs like a pulsating boil. "Yes, master, yes, yes," it chants.

He fixes it with a gelid, yellow gaze. "Don't make me wait."

"No, master, no," it assures him. It casts a final, longing glance at Liese and the golden fall of her hair, and then it turns and scuttles to the kitchen to gather the necessary supplies.

He carries her down a narrow corridor and into a tiny bedroom with a bed and a simple, three-drawer dresser. A stunted, three-legged stool squats at the foot of the bed, and a round endtable lurks behind the half-open door and hosts a washbasin and a thick, ceramic ewer. An empty closet gapes idiotically to the left of the dresser, and a single window in the wall opposite the door mars it like an unsightly afterthought.

He lies her upon the bed on her uninjured side and smooths the hair from her forehead. She's flagging badly now, desperate to slip into sleep, and yet she resists, blinking up at him with drooping eyelids.

"Sleep," he murmurs. "I'll take care of you."

"You always did."

The familiar creeps in, tray in hand. "As you requested, master," it announces.

"Leave it."

"Yes," it agrees, and sets the tray atop the dresser, but it doesn't depart. It merely stands there, wringing venous, emaciated hands and eyeing the blood seeping from Liese's wounds with ill-concealed hunger.

He turns with the speed of a striking rattlesnake and seizes it by the scrawny, fragile throat. It's light and inconsequential as dust in his grip, and he lifts its feet off the floor and squeezes until the cartilage and doughy flesh bulge between his fingers. "Does she please you?" he murmurs. Its feet pedal frantically in the air in search of purchase, and it looks at him with wide, terrified eyes. "I told you never to touch her," he purrs. "If you do, if you even think about it, I will unzip you from cock to sniveling face and paint these walls with your decaying guts. Do I make myself clear?"

It nods, and tears well in its eyes. The small capillaries have burst, and he watches its irises turn pink. "Y's, M'ster," it rasps hoarsely, vocal cords fluttering like a moth's wings against his palm.

"Have you ever known me to lie?" He tightens his grip.

It shakes his head.

He lets it go with a snort of contempt. "Get out."

It flees, whining piteously and clutching its bruised and rapidly-swelling throat. He watches until it calipers down the hall and around the corner, and then he closes and locks the door.

"Always so protective," Liese says sleepily from behind him.

He picks up the tray and carries it to her bedside. "Sleep, Liese," he says. "I told you'd I'd take care of you." He sets the tray on the floor and kneels beside it to peel the bloody tatters of wool from the wound again. "I need to take this off. Can you sit up?"

"You just told me to go to sleep," she points out, but she raises her hips and lets him tug her cassock over her hips to just beneath her breasts. He's surprised to find a thin, white slip of rough-spun cotton. It, too, is bloody and torn, and he raises it with ginger fingers to reveal drab, grey underclothes of the same material.

"You didn't think we went bare under there?" she asks, amused, and lets her hips sink to the mattress.

"I never thought about it." _When I thought of you, I thought of your naked flesh warm and yielding beneath my hands and mouth._ He picks up a cloth and dips it into the bowl of hot water. "This is going to sting," he warns, and begins to daub the oozing tears.

She flinches from the contact and hisses between clenched teeth, but settles quickly and endures his ministrations in stoic silence. After a few brushes of the cloth, she says, "Did you?"

"Did I what?" His attention remains on the task at hand.

"Go bare."

"Sister! If I didn't know better, I'd say you were entertaining lustful and licentious thoughts," he teases. "But no. It would've been uncomfortable and impractical in combat. It's hard to concentrate on the enemy when there's sand in the crack of your ass," he says drily.

She cackles at that, and he pauses in his work to wait out her fit of mirth. "I suppose it would be," she mutters.

When he's cleaned the wounds of sand and flecks of wool and cotton, he drops the soiled cloth and picks up the bottle of brandy. "This is going to burn like hell," he tells her, and before she can tense against the pain, he pours two fingers of the rich amber liquid over her injuries.

She's too disciplined to writhe, but her fingers claw into the mattress, and she clamps her lips shut against a shout. She goes limp with relief when the searing agony of purification by the unholy spirit begins to ebb.

"Here." He offers her the bottle. "Take a sip. It'll help with this next part."

She eyes the bottle with a mixture of longing and disgust. "You know I'm forbidden to take alcohol."

"You take Communion wine," he points out.

"It's been blessed by the Fathers and thereby cleansed of iniquitous impurities."

"'Iniquitous impurities,'" he snorts. "But if it will make you feel better." He sighs and performs the stations of the cross over the bottle. "Bless, O Lord, this drink which Thou hast created, that it may be a salutary remedy for all who partake of it, and grant that it may, by invoking Thy holy name, receive health for body and soul. Through Christ our Lord. Amen."

She gazes at him in logy amazement. "Huh."

"What?" 

"You didn't burst into flame for invoking the name of our Lord like the Church said you would."

"You'll find that they were wrong about a great many things." He holds out the bottle again. "Now drink."

She accepts it and takes a dainty, parsimonious swallow. "More," he orders, and she grudgingly complies.

He retrieves the bottle and uses its contents to sterilize the needle, and then he allows himself a long, delicious pull before he replaces the cap and sets it aside. "Don't move," he says, and begins the painstaking work of putting his precious Liese together again. "Sister Khara was always better at this," he muses as he works.

"It's because she was obsessive. You were always gentler."

"I suspect her hands gentled plenty when it came to him."

"You noticed, too?"

"Notice? It was hard to miss."

She hums in distant agreement.

She drifts after that, content to leave him to his work. Her body relaxes beneath his fingers as she succumbs to sleep, and he finds himself humming tunelessly as the needle pierces her skin and pulls the thin filaments of thread in its wake. He works with persnickety care, determined that the scars should be as inconspicuous as possible. She's too beautiful to be so marred, too fine a gift to the world to be so ill-used by it.

"No more scars," he murmurs. "No more blood spilled for an ungrateful world."

He sews the stitches as fine as he can make them, and when he has knotted the last, he surveys them with a critical eye. They're jagged and ugly against her smooth skin, an offense to the eye, but they're the best that he can do with the supplies at hand.

_Besides,_ he assures himself as he wipes his bloody fingers on a hank of cloth, _once she takes the blood of the Queen, all her old hurts will pass away, and she will be remade as she was meant to be, without flaw._

He dabs at the faint flecks of blood that cling to the skin around his careful work. _Just a taste, the voice of temptation urges. Just one._

He looks at her, sleeping so peacefully, so guileless and trusting and sure of his affection for her.

_Just lap that single drop from her skin. No fangs, no poisonous bite._

He dips his head and lets his dry lips skim the cool flesh. He can smell her, sweat and sand and the copper of blood, and he moans softly. So sweet, so good, everything that he had imagined when he'd stolen from an encampment to creep among the rocks and take himself in hand within their concealing shadows. He still remembers the patter of his seed upon the sands when the pleasure exceeded his burning shame and his hips rocked and jerked of their own accord. Inside his jeans, his cock stirs, and he resists the urge to palm himself through the stiff fabric. He's scant millimeters from the drop now. It's no bigger than a teardrop. All he has to do is open his mouth and flick the tip of his tongue, and he will know her more intimately than any mortal has ever known a woman.

She stirs beneath him, and a soft, low moan escapes her. It's too much, and he reels from her so quickly that he nearly falls on his ass. He scrambles to his feet and staggers toward the door, and then he's jerking the knob so hard that it comes off in his hand and splinters the jamb. He drops the disarticulated knob and lurches down the hall and into the bathroom two doors down. His cock is so much need and iron inside his jeans, and the brush of denim and cotton is an unendurable torment against hypersensitive flesh.

He frees himself from his clothes, and it's over in half a dozen frantic strokes of his hand. He buries his face in the crook of his arm and bites into his leather duster as he comes, and then he wavers over the toilet on knees that threaten to unhinge and waits for his pounding heart to slow.

_Soon,_ he thinks as he gropes blindly for the flush handle. _Soon it won't be your hand there. It'll be hers. Or her mouth. Or her cunt. All that's needed now is patience._

"Johannes?" The plaintive call of a child who's awoken in the night to find herself alone. "Johannes, where are you? Johannes?" Shrill and laced with burgeoning panic.

He straightens and hurriedly stuffs himself into his clothes, and then he scurries back to the bedroom to find a disoriented Liese wiping sleep from her eyes and struggling to get up. She looks up at the sound of his footfalls, and the relief on her face makes his jaw ache.

"I thought you were a dream," she says miserably. "I've dreamed of this so many times, only to wake and find it was just another of God's jests."

"I'm not a dream," he assures, and closes the now knobless door behind him.

She holds out her arms. "Then come, brother," she implores him. "Please, I can't. I can't...not again." Her chest hitches.

He needs no more invitation. He sheds his boots and pants where he stands and drops his hat onto the dresser, and then he climbs onto the bed beside her and gathers her to him, careful not to jar her ribs. There is no Church to demand they remain separate, and so he tucks her against him and entangles their limbs. "I'm here, sister," he whispers into her ear, and presses a kiss to the thin flesh behind it. "I'm right here." He rocks her gently and buries his face in her hair.

"If this is a dream, then I do not wish to wake."

"It's not a dream, I promise. I'll be here when you wake."

"Please don't go, Johannes."

"I won't. "Now, ssssh. Sleep," he mouths into her hair.

He rocks her until she goes limp in his embrace and begins to snore softly, and only then does he allow himself to feel the weariness of the day's toil. _Mine,_ he thinks as the sun ascends and his eyelids grow heavy. _Mine at last._

And for the first time since he was pulled from the light of the world and plunged into the cold, smothering dark of Sola Mira, he feels alive.


	4. Sister Mine, I Have Brought You Home

The ache of her cracked rib and the pinch and nettle of the stitches in her side pull her from sleep. She lies beneath the thin, white coverlet and blinks at the far wall until her eyes adjust. The light that spills from the lone window is wan and rosy. Dusk, she supposes, or a little after. She holds her breath and rolls to her back, and her hand gropes blindly for the tangle of her brother's limbs or the lean warmth of his belly, but she finds only disheveled sheets, cool to the touch. The disappointment drives the breath from her, and her chest hitches convulsively.

 _Just another dream,_ she thinks miserably, and she curls in on herself despite the agonizing protest from her wounded side. _I thought he was here. I could feel him, smell him. He whispered my name like he used to and tended my wounds. He held me while I slept._ She raises her hands before her face as though to search him out upon her skin, but she smells only sour sweat. 

_Not fair!_ her mind screams, and she swallows an anguished cry.

She has dreamed of him before, but never so vividly. In the days and months following his death, she had found him in her dreams almost every night, walking over the desert sands in his cassock and bidding her follow him as his rosary glistened in the moonlight. She found him in the barracks, sitting cross-legged on the end of his cot with his Bible open on his lap and a mischievous smirk playing on his lips. _Hello, sister. Planning new rebellions in your heart?_ She found him on her forays through the city, a flickering shadow at her shoulder as she wrested necessities from the miserly grasps of the shopkeepers. She found him at her back in her cot in the barracks, weight and wool and plosive breaths against the shell of her ear. She had woken from these dreams with her heart in her throat and her face wet with tears, fingers clawed in her bed linen or tangled in her rosary. But for all the grief and terrible longing they had brought her, they had been mercifully remote, visions glimpsed in an icy mirror.

But this one...oh, this one. He had been so solid beneath her hands, so clear to her disbelieving eyes. His fingers had moved over her flesh, and his voice had rumbled in her ears, that rough baritone that she had loved so well, and that had raised gooseflesh on her arms whenever he'd whispered into her ear. Her name had poured from his tongue like sweet wine, and he had enfolded her in a protective embrace. He had crooned into her ear and promised to be here when she awoke.

And yet, the bed is empty.

Perhaps this is the wages of sin, punishment from God for the weakness in her heart. Because the Johannes of her dreams had been right for all his impish teasing. She _had_ been planning rebellions in her heart. She served the Church because she had known no better path, had been offered to them like sacrificial chattel by parents cowed by its power and in need of one less mouth to feed, but as she had grown into the stripling gangle of her limbs, she had begun to imagine other paths. She had pictured a life beyond the grey, loveless cloister of the barracks, a life of freedom and gaiety and limitless opportunity. Much of it had been the stuff of childish, naive optimism, unattainable in a world razed and rendered sterile by nuclear bombs dropped thirty years before she was born, but there had been one constant. No matter the shape of her dreams, Johannes had always featured as the treasured centerpiece. When she was small, she had envisioned as an eternal playmate, someone with whom to scramble over the walls of the city and frolic among the dunes of the desert, but as knobs and hard, spare angles had softened into pliant flesh and feminine curves and the older sisters and unsmiling Priestesses had handed her sanitary pads and lectured her on the licentious temptations of the sinful flesh, he had transformed into something forbidden that had kindled a feverish ache between her legs.

Fifteen years old and stealing furtive glances at him during catechism class, mouth dry and skin curiously hot as she watched the thin line of his mouth and wondered what his pale lips would feel like on hers or on the line of her jaw or the pale, sensitive flesh of her throat. Sitting at the long, low trestle table that served as the dining hall and watching him peel an orange with nails worried to the quick. Feeling her heart flutter when he offered her the first section. Standing at attention in the training yard and watching those same hands snap a length of wood with a single blow. Watching the muscles of his back flex and ripple as he grappled with the priests and the older acolytes, teeth bared in a feral snarl while the blood oozed from his nose onto his lips. Sneaking into the cell where he hung suspended by his arms and legs, back bowed and head lolling, and running a scrap of damp cloth over his welted, bruised flesh. Flushing when his eyes fluttered open to gaze at her with unsettling awareness. The shameful frisson of unnamed want that danced along her spine when he spat blood upon the floor of his cell and begged her for even a drop of water in a raw rasp that inspired both anger and solicitous pity. Pressing the cloth to his lips and trying to ignore the unseemly tightening of her belly as he sucked as much moisture as he could from the fabric.

Sixteen and keenly aware of his gaze upon her as she tried to perform her daily meditations. Equally aware of the deepening of his voice and the broadening of his chest. Her name had taken a different resonance in his mouth, had been laced with plea and promise. Entangling her fingers with his for the briefest instant under the pretense of handing him his rosary or his Bible. Exchanging knowing, fond smiles as they passed in the corridor or knelt in the chapel, hands folded in pious prayer while their minds traveled less righteous roads. Watching him wash his hair with the water from a ewer, dry-mouthed and light-headed as it beaded in the ends of his lush, dark hair and cascaded over his sun-reddened shoulders. Standing in the shower later that night with her nipples hard as pebbles beneath the lukewarm spray and fighting the urge to rut against her fingers.

Seventeen and accompanying a priestess on a shopping trip in the heart of the city. Slipping through the milling throngs with the nimbleness of a minnow. No weapons then, just her rosary around her neck and a vial of holy water in her pockets. Getting separated in the peristaltic crush of the midday crowd and rounding the corner to see a woman kneeling in the alley with her dress hiked over her undulating hips and her mouth around a man's swollen prick. Standing transfixed as her head bobbed in languorous counterpoint to the man's thrusting hips. His head had lolled against the grimy facade of the building, and the woman's hand had snaked between her thighs. She'd gaped in frozen fascination until the priestess had seized her by the sleeve of her robe and dragged her away, hissing Scripture and condemnation in her ear. Standing at the whipping post, the leather of the bindings biting into her wrists, and bucking beneath the stroke of the lash. Her hair in her face and the silence of the room as the others watched. Knowing he was there, watching the whip caress her exposed flesh. The simmering welter of the stripes as she lay on her cot. Falling asleep and dreaming of the couple in the alley. Of the man's rocking hips and guttural moans and the sublime expression on their faces. The Church said that fornication was a sin, a vice worthy of damnation, but there had been no shame in their expressions, no fear of Divine wrath, only blissful ecstasy. Just before she had awoken with a slick dampness between her thighs, it hadn't been the strange man with his mouth in a boneless gape and his hips rolling into the woman's sucking mouth, but Johannes, grunting and thrusting. And when his hand had come to rest atop her head, she realized it was her kneeling between his legs, fingers working furiously between her legs.

Seventeen and kneeling before the altar in the barracks chapel, hands folded and eyes closed against the memory of an iniquitous dream, the heavy, wooden cross as discomfiting as the gaze of her confessor. Hearing footsteps behind her, and knowing, even before she raised her head and turned to look, who it was. The smell of him as he knelt beside her and folded his hands and the rattle of his rosary beads as they slipped through his fingers. His strong fingers curling around her wrist for a fleeting instant, touch in defiance of the sanctity of prayer. Her name whispered in her ear, a prayer not meant for Him. The frisson of want as he stroked her cheek before rising and leaving the way he had come.

Eighteen and standing in a small, isolated corner of the ordination hall, raw weeping crosses pressed together as their foreheads touched. His fingers entangled with hers and his breath on her cheek and nose. So solid and strong, and so very near in the undisturbed stillness. Her body had sung with desire, taut and restless and desperate to press itself against him, to feel the deceptive power hidden beneath the folds of his robes. The breathless scrape of feet as she yielded to temptation and stepped into his embrace. The needy, possessive rake of his fingers through her hair, and the raggedness of his breathing as she pressed her palm to his chest to feel the thunder of his heartbeat.

 _Liese. My Liese._ So much need. So much said in so little.

And she had been his. Then, before, and ever after. She would have kissed him then, if a shadow had not swept across the wall in the familiar billow of a priest's robes, would have risen on her toes and sought his lips and run her fingers through his hair. But the shadow had fallen over them like the disapproving eye of God, and so they had parted in haste, smoothing their robes and muttering meaningless abjurations to godliness. They had not looked at one another again until they were safely in the company of others of stronger conviction, and then they been models of propriety, chaste and proper and aloof. That night in the barracks, she'd curled upon her cot and moaned into the pillow with the force of her stymied arousal, thighs trembling and slick and coarse panties sticking to her hypersensitive cunt. But she had not succumbed to the failing of her flesh. She had fisted her hands and rocked to and fro until exhaustion took her, and in the morning, she'd knelt in the chapel, the pitted stone hard against her bare knees, and flogged herself until her back sizzled with the sting and prick of untold needles.

Nineteen and twenty and twenty-one and unable to sever the bond between them or smother the ache in her heart and between her legs. Following him on hunts and thrumming with the impulse to touch him, to come up behind him, press her nose to his nape, and simply breathe him in while the sand filled her hair like wedding rice. Sitting shoulder to shoulder in the dark and turning to press a quick, blind kiss to his shoulder. The answering caress of his fingers on her ankle. Lying on the desert hardpan with him at her back and fighting not to turn into his protective embrace and awaken him with hot, open-mouthed kisses that would transform his fraternal agape into a feverish, carnal entanglement of sweating, writhing limbs. Feeling the urgent hardness tucked against the swell of her rump and wishing she could rock against it. Lying on the hardpan with him at her back and seeing the couple from the alley, the snap and roll of his hips and the bob of her head as she sucked him into her slurping, puckered mouth. Staring at the endless expanse of sand and rocky outcroppings and wishing she could know something so sweet, could see his face so contorted with pleasure and unencumbered by care. Wishing she could know his heat and quench her insatiable curiosity.

Twenty-two and twenty-three and holding to her vows of chastity by the slenderest of threads. Praying for the strength to endure and terrified that it would not be enough. Sure that if she betrayed her vow and slipped into the night to take him between her thighs, God's grace would bleed from her as surely as the blood from her surrendered maidenhead and the seed from his sated lust and render her useless to the brotherhood and forever tainted, a child of Cain with no place to call home. Petrified that he would share her fate and despise her for it, would shun her for bringing him low. Plagued by visions of leading the order to unwitting slaughter because she no longer stood in God's favor and was become a liability.

Twenty-four and taunted by the specter of hope. The queens had begun to fall in greater numbers, and the vampire population had been in precipitous decline. Attacks on the cities were rarer and rarer and murmurs rippled through the orders that the end was near. Brothers and sisters still trained and meditated and prayed, still bent the knee to the Almighty, but there was also talk of life after the war. Talk of farms and trades joined theological debates at the table. Some talked of venturing beyond the city walls to see what remained of God's good earth. Even Johannes had begun to talk of the future. Publicly, he spoke of a sojourn in Vienna and study in their rumored theological libraries. Privately, he spoke of looking for his parents and finding the river in which he'd once fished as a boy. And all of it had carried an unspoken invitation.

Twenty-five and squatting in the dark outside of Sola Mira, shoulder to shoulder and gazing up at the tall, craggy spire. Hearing his breath and the scrape of sand beneath his shoes as he shifted position. Reaching out to take his hand, shielded from prying eyes by the rock behind which they sheltered. His gentle answering squeeze. Knowing that she would go with him if he asked, would follow him from the dead sands to the river valley of his childhood. She would find a vocation to busy her hands and gladden her heart, and she would keep his house. She would take him if he came to her, would ease the eternal hunger that had ignited in her bones all those years ago, when she had wondered what it would be like to taste of him, and if God willed it, she would bear his children, no longer a chaste sister of his heart, but his beloved wife.

She had almost offered herself to him then, almost raised his hand to her lips and bid him come with her into the warren of jumbled stones that surrounded their encampment, but she hadn't dared. They'd been so close, so close to the end of the war and their obligation to the Church, and if she faltered now, at the eleventh hour and sent him to his death for a moment of fumbling passion, there could be no forgiveness. So she had foreborne. She would wait until the fight was done, would go to him once they were back in the barracks. Perhaps to the training yard, where they would lay their burden down beneath the twinkling gaze of heaven and pledge themselves to one another with every delirious, unpracticed jerk and roll of her hips. Perhaps in the tiny bathroom, clawing at the stucco with wet fingers as they bodies succumbed to primal instinct. Perhaps in the stinking isolation of the cells where an angry boy had been reforged into a relentless warrior. Or perhaps in the chapel in an act of rebellion against the whipping post and the impassive gaze of the Lord who had demanded of them flesh and blood and had denied them even the meanest of comforts. 

Except he had never returned to the barracks, and her grudging purity had remained intact.

 _I should have done it,_ she thinks as she tenses against the tenderness in her side and sits up. _If I had, I could've taken meager solace in the memory of his hands and his mouth and the fire in his eyes. Instead, I wonder what might have been and conjure phantoms and abominations in my mind._

_If you had, you might've ended up with your purity on the sand and his bastard get in your belly. That would've been just your luck given the previous track of your life. You would've been a fallen woman with a fatherless child in your belly. The brothers and sisters of your order might have pitied you, have done their best to offer your shelter and solace in deference to all the trials you had shared, but the Church would never have countenanced your sin, not when the proof of it grew with each passing day and made a mockery of their vaunted claims to piety. You would've been excommunicated and expelled from the barracks, a brazen fornicator and traitor to your sacred oath. There would have been no charity for you, not from the Church Fathers who had once called you daughter, and not from the public, who would shun you as a craven slattern and a selfish, flawed tool who had shirked her holy duty for a moment of base pleasure. You would have been a penniless pariah, and if you had not died of starvation or miscarried in some filthy alley because of malnutrition, you would have delivered his issue in some tarpaper hovel while rain leaked through the roof and some gnarled, hunch-backed crone squatted between your legs._

_I was alive down there for days, weeks._ That's what he'd said, the Johannes of her bittersweet dream. Maybe that was his punishment for the sin of desire, to die a slow, excruciating, lonely death at the hands of his enemies because he had loved her. And maybe this was hers, to wander in a hell of waking dreams until the end of her days, longing for what might have been in a kinder world.

"Is this your punishment, Almighty father?" she croaks to the golden light of the room, her voice rough with sleep and bitterness. "Is this my penance for loving him more than I ever loved You, for fighting for him instead of You?" 

_You should hardly be surprised at his vindictive pettiness, child,_ whispers a bilious, sneering voice inside her head. _If you want to know his mind, you need only look at the conduct of his servants. After all, as they so often reminded you, they were made in His image._

 _If this is a dream, then who cleaned and dressed your wounds? Those are real enough._ They twinge and throb as though to emphasize the point, and she throws back the covers and swings her legs over the side of the bed.

The others, like as not, Priest or Khara or even one of the acolytes.

 _If they patched you up, then what are you doing here?_ the voice persists. _This certainly isn't the barracks._

From what she remembers as she rises gingerly to her feet with a hand pressed to her injured rib, the fighting had been hot and heavy. There had been dozens of vampires, perhaps as many as fifty, and the casualties had been high. Maybe Priest had decided to fall back to a more defensible position until the vampires broke off the assault and they could flee to the sanctuary of the city walls with their dead and wounded in tow and their tails tucked between their legs.

And there had been so many dead. That she remembers with painful clarity as she hobbles toward the door. They never should have gone to meet the devil armed with nothing but crumbling convictions and a gaggle of half-trained children. It had been hubris and folly, and they had paid for it in blood. Not theirs, though. The price was seldom exacted from those who deserved it. It was the children and the widows and the soldiers who suffered.

_It's hardly the first time Priest has been guilty of such recklessness. He never should have led you into Sola Mira, and he never should have insisted that you stay behind like some absurd doorman, idling at camp while your brothers died and they dragged Johannes down screaming into the dark, but he did, and you have suffered for it every day since._

It would be convenient to lay the blame for this latest debacle at his feet alone, perversely gratifying, but in truth, they are all to blame. She had known his plan for suicide the moment she heard it, and so had Khara, but they had gone along with it anyway, Khara for love and she for weary indifference. She had been too tired to fight, too eager to meet her own death and find release in its embrace, and so she had meekly offered up half a dozen souls for slaughter. If she would not burn for her unchaste love for her sweetest brother, then surely she would burn for that. They all would. Only Mariel had been strong enough to see the truth and speak it clearly, and only she would be held blameless on the day of judgment. 

_The old woman deserves an apology,_ she thinks as she gropes groggily for the doorknob. _I'll have to bring it to her on penitent knees._

And then she stops. Her hands find no knob to grasp, and her gummy eyes register only a ragged hole and a splintered jamb. She surveys it in mute consternation for a moment, and then she turns and scans the room. No doorknob, but there is a bottle of brandy on the floor and a bowl of bloody water. She wrinkles her nose at the latter and turns to face the door again.

 _He gave me the brandy before he started stitching, made me drink it to numb the pain. Poured it into the cuts, too. Burned like hell._ Her skin simmers and prickles with the memory, and unseen fingers move over her flesh with delicate care. His voice in her ear, low and sultry, smoke and longing and the promise of a kiss, and her chest cramps with ancient grief. _Where are you?_ she thinks, and whines helplessly. _If this is real, then where are you? You promised you'd be here when I woke up._ He'd shed his boots and pants and hat before he'd crawled into bed and cradled her to him, but there are neither boots nor crumpled jeans on the floor, and there is no hat on the dresser.

 _Maybe he put them back on,_ suggests the voice of reason.

Or maybe they'd never been there at all. Maybe he'd been nothing but a hallucination conjured by her mind in the thick of the fighting, a figment of her imagination born of guilt and loneliness and her unspoken wish for death. She'd long hoped that he would come for her in the end, when either time or the crushing, rending fangs of the vampire caught up with her, would open his arms and usher her from this world with a smile and a gentle murmur. She would go before God on his arm, and perhaps the Lord would be more merciful in his judgment than the Church Fathers had been in theirs.

_Then how do you explain the differences in him? The yellow eyes and the glint of fangs behind his upper lip?_

Perhaps death had transformed him, mortal flesh exchanged for the celestial bodies they had been promised by the Word of the Lord.

 _So God gave him the likeness of a vampire, His sworn enemy, as recompense for his loyal service and selfless sacrifice?_ says a decidedly skeptical voice.

 _Maybe you're dead,_ offers the listless, matter-of-fact voice of pragmatism. _Maybe you saw him because that vampire knocked you out of the sky and tore your throat out. Maybe it wasn't him who carried you here, but Priest with another body on his conscience, or an acolyte. Maybe they tried to patch you up but couldn't, and you bled to death in that hard spinster's bed. Or maybe you never made it off the sand. Maybe you're still lying out there with all the rest, the ones who never wanted to die, calling to the blowflies and the jackals with the stink of your rot and turning to leather in the sun. Maybe this is your judgment. Maybe God, in His mercy, decided that this is to be your eternity, a hell of rough-hewn wood and creaking floorboards and wounds that never heal, of a loneliness that never fades. Maybe you'll walk here forever, always seeing Johannes from the corner of your eye and never quite reaching him no matter how fast you run or how far you reach, Tantalus straining in vain, not for a peach or a single drop of water, but for the merest brush of a cherished hand._

_Maybe you'll open the door and find the devil waiting for you on the other side._

There is nothing on the other side of the door but an empty hallway. And the missing doorknob, which lies just beyond the threshold. She nudges it aside with her toes and shuffles from the room to investigate the others that line the hall. The first is a tiny, windowless room crammed with miscellaneous bric-a-brac--a spindle-legged chair, an old sewing machine stacked atop a basket bulging with scraps of fabric, a kerosene lamp, old family photographs in tarnished frames, a wooden cradle tucked improbably in the far corner. She ponders it with idle curiosity for a moment, drawn to its pathos as it peers from behind the chair legs like a forgotten pup, and then she forsakes it and peeks into the next door, which proves to be a bathroom.

Her bladder cries out in needy recognition at the sight of the toilet, and she hobbles inside and closes the door behind her. It's a full two minutes before she can convince her battered rib to let her squat on the cool, porcelain oval, and she heaves a sigh of relief as the heaviness in her bladder recedes in a tinkling splash. "Thank you, Father," she murmurs as her body does its ignominious work.

She sits there with the fabric of her robes bunched in her hands and assesses the situation. Now that wakefulness has come, she can smell herself, sour and stale and coppery, sweat and old blood. She inspects her robes and groans at the blood-encrusted tears she discovers. The blood can be removed, perhaps, if she soaks it in cold water and scrubs it in borax soap, but there's no guarantee she'll find any here, and in any case, the tears make it a moot point. She could sew them shut, but they would be ugly and puckered and prone to further damage. A single loose thread could provide purchase for a vampire's killing claws. They're ruined, good for nothing but dusting rags for the chapel.

_That assumes you'll ever see the chapel again. You're probably dead, remember?_

Her wounded side throbs in vociferous counterpoint to this logic, and she eyes the tiny bathtub opposite her with a mixture of trepidation and longing. It's been days since she bathed, and her dry, gritty skin thirsts for moisture and a prolonged soak, but her mind balks at raising her leg high enough to step into the tub when the motion promises a bolt of exquisite pain. Still, the prospect of warm water makes her skin itch with anticipation. She has endured the agonies of training and battle and the privations of the march. Surely she can grit her teeth long enough to get into the tub.

She rises from the toilet and carefully pulls her robes over her head. She's dismayed to see that her shift, too, is in bloody tatters over her hip. She had hoped to salvage it, at least until she could cobble together another cassock or find a reasonable substitute, but it looks like she'll have to do without. The cassock will have to remain in service until she can stitch something together from the scraps in the other room.

 _I'll be the priestess of many colors,_ she muses as she curls her fingers around the ragged hem of her shift and prepares to tug it over her head.

A gentle rap upon the door. "Sister, is that you?"

She's so startled that she reels on her feet and nearly collapses onto the toilet, whose bowl protrudes from beneath the tank like the pooched lip of a toddler in tantrum. Her hand shoots out to clutch wildly at the sink, and there she stands, ass in the air and hand locked spasmodically around the edge of the sink, when the door opens to reveal Johannes.

"Are you all right?" he asks, and steps into the room to take her by the shoulders.

She can only gape at him, chest seized in a cramp that drives the breath from her lungs and crushes the words in her throat. He's dressed just as he was last night, in boots and jeans and a leather duster. She remembers the cool softness of that duster as he'd carried her across the desert and left the others far behind in a roil of blood and dust. _You're real. You're here._ Her hand comes up to cup his face, and she feels stubble like the grit of sand against her palm.

He turns his face into her touch and nuzzles her fingers. "Why do you look so surprised? I told you I would be here when you woke."

"But you weren't. I was alone. You're not real. You cannot be real."

"And why not?" He raises his head but tangles his fingers with hers.

"You're dead. You died in Sola Mira. You never came back. You never..." Her throat burns, acid and lye, and a terrible cramp masses in her chest, squeezing her heart in a pitiless fist. She will not, must not. It is an act as forbidden to her as the desire that had once driven her to audacious dreams of a sweeter life beyond the snaring, strangling reach of the Church. Those who had died in the service of the Lord were martyrs to be praised and gloried, not mourned. She would not take from him what little the Church had given. "Besides, you've got stubble."

It's a ridiculous straw at which to grasp. She's seen him scruffy and unshaven a thousand times on hunts, when toiletries were a frivolity best left behind in favor of an extra knife or more throwing crosses, but it's all she can think as she wrestles with an anguish sunk so deeply into her bones that it will never come out and blinks up at golden eyes that hold a terrible familiarity despite their strangeness.

"A problem easily remedied," he assures her, eyes dancing with amusement, and pulls her against him in a snug embrace. "I would peel the very flesh from my bones if it would convince you that I am alive."

And he does feel so alive as she rests in his arms. He smells of cinnamon and sage, and his heartbeat is strong and steady beneath her palm. She closes her eyes, and for a moment, she's eighteen again, with the proof of her oath etched into her forehead and her blood mingling with his as they stand with their heads pressed together in that isolated corner of the ordination hall. The war looms before them, and death, and so much sorrow, but for now they are young and whole and bright with hope and vigor and unsullied righteousness. There is still time for all the dreams that they nurture in the secret cloisters of their hearts, still reason to believe in happily ever after. She is his, and he is hers, even if they cannot say it, cannot take that sacred oath before God and the taciturn Church Fathers. If she raises her gaze now, she will find lovely dark eyes and thin lips rosy with the promise of a kiss, but when she looks up, she sees eyes the color of summer honey, and she remembers.

 _Desires such as these are what killed him, what led you to this path of perdition,_ scolds the voice of her confessor, hard and unstinting as the stone floor of the chapel on which she has so often knelt.

She stiffens as disentangles herself. "Thank you, brother. I'm fine. I was just considering a bath."

He blinks at her. "You can have one, but I must warn you that there is no hot water. I can have the familiar heat some on the stove if you like. It might take a while if you insist on the tub, but you could always go the campfire route," he suggests, referring to the haphazard sponge baths to which they had often resorted on a hunt, when they'd crouched behind rocks and sloughed the dirt from their skin with rags wet with water from their canteens. "I could be of help if you need it."

"No," she snaps, and he recoils from her unexpected vehemence. "No," she repeats, ashamed. "It's all right, brother. I would not entice you to impure thoughts."

He purses his lips as though to speak, but then thinks better of it. "Water for the tub, then?"

"No. I'll clean up in my room."

"Fine. I'll see if I can find a change of clothes. Just leave your robes outside the door."

"Thank you."

"Anything for you, sister," he says quietly, and her heart aches at the tenderness in it.

She waits until the door closes behind him and his footsteps recede down the hall, and when she's sure he isn't lurking outside the door, she slips from the room and goes back to her bedroom to await the arrival of his familiar.

 

While his Liese conducts her ablutions in the small bedroom, he devotes himself to the task of finding clothes for her. The lady of the house has been dead for nearly a year, and in truth, not much remains of the life she'd once lived here. He'd had most of her belongings carted out and burned. The familiars had looted the rest, he supposes, sold the jewelry for what coin flaking gold plating and tarnished silver could fetch. There are a handful of things crammed into the unadorned little room beside the bathroom, but he doesn't recall seeing any clothes in there. Just old photographs and swatches of fabric in patterns suited to small children and over-rouged matrons. Still, there might be something in the wardrobe in his bedroom, a dress or a nightgown with which to preserve her modesty.

Not that he wants to preserve it, mind. If he had his druthers, he'd strip her bare and lay her upon his bed and feast upon her, partake of all the delights he has so long been denied, but she's clearly not ready to indulge his hunger. She's too peaked and frail, a pallid, tottering wisp in her robes. She's underfed, and even after a long, unbroken sleep nestled in the safety of his arms, there are deep, worrying shadows beneath her eyes, bruises left by a cruel hand. Last night as she'd slept, he'd surreptitiously raised her robes to examine her in the moonlight. Lean and spare and hard, she'd been, all sinew and pith, a weapon worn to the nub by the rigors of war with nothing of youth's vigor in her. No soft, ripe sweetness, only muscle and bone and milky skin. 

_And still, you wanted to touch her. You wanted to caress her thighs, to feel the silk of them beneath your fingertips. You wanted to pull down her ragged, grey undershorts and see her cunt, to run your fingers through the coarse curls and slip them between her folds. You wanted her to grow wet and swollen beneath your sly, fumbling ministrations, to moan and whimper and buck while your fingers worked her slick, heated flesh. You wanted her to open her legs in mute, needy invitation, and you wanted to lower your head and lap at her forbidden sweetness until she rose and shuddered, keening and digging her nails into your shoulders._

He growls helplessly as the images dance across his mind with painful clarity and send blood into his restless cock. Of course he did. He's wanted that, wanted her, since his pubescent cock had first stirred between his legs at twelve. He hadn't had a name for it then, hadn't understood why the sight of her had stirred a low-banked fire in his belly that had turned his balls to lead and sent curls of lazy smoke through his veins. Understanding had come a few years later, when he was fifteen and hard as birchbark inside his robes as he'd hung from the ropes inside his cell and she'd drawn a cloth over his grimy, tortured flesh. Along the inside of his welted legs like a lascivious tongue and across his belly, and oh, God, how he'd wanted her hand to drift to his crotch, where his cock stood to attention against his belly, but it never had. She'd been too oblivious or too pious, and he'd been too weak from the Church's discipline to shift his hips into her path.

The picture had grown clearer when he was sixteen and Priest had taken him on a patrol. The supervising priest had broken off to explore the perimeter, and he and Priest had stumbled across a brothel whose upstairs windows were open. Priest, ever the obedient acolyte, had quickly averted his gaze, but he had stared in astonishment, suddenly too hot inside his skin. He doesn't remember much about what he'd seen before Priest had tugged him away, hissing admonitions in his burning ear--certainly not the faces of the couple in the window--but he's never forgotten the sinuous writhe of their joined bodies atop the bedclothes, the raw, sweaty undulation of them. Nor has he forgotten the bob and sway of the woman's breasts as the man rode her from behind.

He'd expected Priest to turn him in for his act of voyeurism, but he never had. Perhaps he'd been moved by a rare paroxysm of mercy for the brother so often flayed bloody by their superiors in an act of morbid public spectacle. Whatever his motives, his brother had kept his secret, and he had kept the recollection of what he'd seen, had turned it over in his mind like an illicit worrystone while he lay upon his cot and savored the feverish lust it had inspired. Sometimes he'd palmed himself beneath the coverlet, breath coming in plosive, furtive gasps as his ears strained for the sound of approaching footsteps. More often than not, he'd carried it with him into the shower, where he'd taken himself into his soap-slick hand and imagined that it was the eager, sucking tightness between Liese's legs. Then he'd come so hard that his knees threatened to buckle and cry out into the muffling crook of his elbow, and when the evidence of his misdeed had washed down the drain, he'd staggered out and wrapped himself in his acolyte's robes and prayed no one would notice the trembling of his knees or the pounding of his heart.

Each time, he'd been overcome by shame and sworn on his knees before God that he would never do it again, never dishonor his sweetest sister with such prurient fantasies, but then he would see her as they studied the Word of the Lord at evening vespers, her head bent to her Bible and her lustrous, golden hair peeking from beneath her hood. Rosy lips and delicate lashes and skin smooth as cream, and all his promises would be forgotten. He would watch her, dry-mouthed and wanting, and when the night drew down and the priests left them to their devices, he would retrieve the memory from its secret place and let its sordid pleasures wash over him, silk and honey against his flesh.

And always, it was his Liese whom he saw in the darkness behind his eyelids.

When he was seventeen, he'd stood to rigid attention with the other acolytes in the chapel and watched as the Father tore the cassock from her back and flogged her for the sin of licentiousness. She, too, it seemed, had witnessed something not meant for godly eyes and would made made to pay the price in blood and pain. He'd been riveted by the unblemished paleness of her back as she set her feet and braced for the first strike of the knotted lash, and he'd been mortified by the ugly thrill of arousal that had gripped him when he'd realized he could see the swell of her breasts in profile as her torn cassock had hung from her arms. She'd cried out behind clenched teeth when the lash struck home, and the sudden, breathless exhalation had conjured images of bodies joined and writing atop the bedsheets, of sweat stippled on rippling bodies. Her body had jerked with each application of God's judgment, and the sway of her breasts as she'd arched had mesmerized him and wrapped lascivious fingers around his cock as it strained against the fabric of his underclothes. He'd been appalled, had thought himself a monster as it had throbbed and twitched in time to the fall of the lash and the sinuous, helpless arch of her spine, but he hadn't been able to stop, to turn his dizzying lust into anger at the Father who would punish her for the unfortunate happenstance of sight and the Church who condoned such cruelty from the safety of the ivory tower. He could only watch and sink deeper into the fantasy that had unspooled itself in his mind, and when the last lash had fallen and the Father had loosened her bonds, he hadn't been able to face her as she'd staggered past with blood oozing down her back and her cassock clutched to her chest like a suckling child.

Nor could he go to her that night as she lay whimpering softly on her cot, curled on her side to spare her inflamed back. His heart had insisted he ought, but he'd been paralyzed by the memory of her swaying breasts and breathless cries, and he'd been embarrassed and convinced that she would sense the black, immoral treachery of his heart beneath his brotherly solicitude. So he'd turned from her muffled, sporadic sniffling and closed his eyes against the need to slip his hand into his pants and spill into his pumping fist. When he'd awoken to the gong for morning vespers, her cot had been empty, and his underclothes had been tacky with dried seed. He'd fled to the shower with burning cheeks and wept while he scrubbed the proof of his sin from his belly, thighs, and flaccid cock.

When he'd scoured himself raw as penance for his selfish faithlessness, he'd crept into the chapel and watched her as she'd bent to her prayers, stiff with the lingering pain of her punishment. When the presiding Father had bent to read from the liturgy, she had turned to offer him a pinched, tired smile. Guilt had swollen within his chest like a bubo, and he'd dropped his gaze and studied the rough grain of the wooden pew in front of him. He hadn't looked at her again until they'd sat to breakfast in the dining hall. She'd slumped heavily at the table and picked listlessly at her bread and cheese, sickly and silent, and he'd thought she was going to be sick, that perhaps the wounds had festered in spite of the priestess' application of salt. He'd shifted uneasily upon the bench and nudged his cup of water in her direction.

 _Drink, sister,_ he'd urged. _You'll heal faster if you keep up your strength._

She'd hesitated a moment, and then her fingers had curled around the cup and drawn it to her. _Gratitude for your charity, brother,_ she'd murmured, and taken an appreciative swallow. 

He'd given a single terse nod of acknowledgment and returned his attention to his plate. His conscience had been hot with guilt as he'd surreptitiously watched her nibble her bread. They had tortured his Liese for the spiteful, perverse sport of it, and he had taken pleasure from her humiliation and agony. He'd wanted to caress her cheek and plead for her forgiveness, but to do so would have been to invite further undeserved punishment upon her innocent head, and so he'd simply offered her the rest of his food and left the hall with his heart in his throat. He'd provoked a fight with the Father during catechism class, and he'd been savagely glad when the old man had whipped him into semi-consciousness and ordered him to two days in the cells. It had been the least he'd deserved for his obscene passions.

And yet, when Liese had sneaked into the cells in the dead watches of the night to croon comforting babble into his ears and sponge the blood from his back, his belly had tightened, and his cracked lips had puckered and twitched with the impulse to turn and kiss her.

 _Take strength in the Lord, brother,_ she'd whispered as she'd bathed his welts with cool water. _He loves you, and so do I._ She'd stroked his face and pressed a kiss to his temple before she'd left, and the euphoria provoked by her touch had temporarily overwhelmed the fire in his flayed back and the high, sharp throb in his straining joints. He'd never wanted it to end, and he'd cried out in forlorn disappointment when she'd gone. The priests, accustomed to groans and sobs from the cells' occupants, had paid him no mind. They'd left him in the embrace of the Lord and spared him no more than a fleeting, disinterested glance as they passed his cell, never knowing that he had found a sweeter embrace by far. The priest had come the next morning to purify his wounds with salt and wring proper penitence from his lips, and when he was released on the morning of the third day, he'd hobbled off on numb feet and found her in the sliver of shade in the training yard. She'd held out her canteen without a word and minded not a bit when he'd drained it nearly dry, and when he'd passed it back, her fingers had lingered on his. She'd smiled at him, conspiratorial and bright as quicksilver, and when he'd settled himself beside her on the dry earth, she'd closed the gap between them until their shoulders touched. So delicate and sweet that his eyes had closed of their own accord to savor it, and he'd turned his face to the sun in wordless gratitude. 

When he was eighteen, all that he desired had been within his grasp. She had been in his arms, and she had been looking at him with such adoration and trust that his heart had stuttered inside his chest in jubilant recognition.

 _She loves me,_ he'd realized with giddy wonderment, and he'd been ten feet tall and light as a feather. _She would be mine if I asked._

And how he'd wanted to. The words had trembled on the tip of his tongue, and he'd longed to whisper them into her ear and breathe them against her cheek, but he'd been stunned by the weight of her palm against his chest. It was so close, so much, more of her touch than he had ever hoped to know, and he'd been terrified of breaking the spell, of moving only to find that it was a dream. So he had simply held her, cradled her to him as though she were a rare and precious gift, and by the time he'd marshaled the courage to speak and offer her his heart and the shabby enticement of life at his side when the killing was done, the shadow of a wandering priest had fallen over the opposite wall and the chance had been lost in a flurry of hastily-disentangling limbs and straightening robes.

He hadn't dared seek her out again until the end of the night after the newly-ordained priests had been assigned to their respective orders and the Lord had seen fit to keep them together. It had seemed a sign to him, proof that God was more merciful than His servants upon Earth, with their flogs and their knouts and their waxy, unsmiling faces. If what he felt for her was a sin, surely He would have parted them forevermore, set them upon paths never meant to cross again. But He had preserved their unity, blessed him with the steadying presence of his sweetest sister. Perhaps the Fathers were mistaken; maybe the Almighty Father approved of the bond between them and wished them to nurture it with the assiduous care of faithful stewards ministering to a faded Eden. If so, he would be faithful in this calling, faithful unto the end of his days, and he would savor its blessings with a glad heart.

He'd approached her with his heart in his hands and been buoyed by the pleasure that had suffused her features at his approach. She'd been radiant with God's grace, resplendent and beautiful in her black robes. Even the slender crucifix that dangled from the end of her rosary had glowed with secret splendor, as though it had been cradled in the hands of the holy host before being entrusted to her. He'd wanted to sweep her into his arms and twirl her until they were giddy and dizzy and laughing helplessly, but the eyes of the Fathers and fellow priests were upon them, and so he had simply inclined his head and bowed over his folded hands.

 _Congratulations, sister,_ he'd intoned with proper solemnity, but an impish smile had tugged at the corners of his mouth. _It will be an honor to serve Him at your side._

 _Likewise, brother,_ she'd replied with aloof dignity, but desert roses had blossomed in her cheeks, and her eyes had sparkled with the same clandestine elation that had bubbled in his veins.

He could not resist, then. He'd had to gloat, to celebrate with she who lit the darkest, coldest corners of her heart, and so he had leaned forward and whispered two words in her ear. _My Liese._ Two words so inadequate to the hopeful, joyous song in his heart, but she had smiled all the same, so lovely that it had made his head swim. She'd understood, just as she always had, and he'd bowed and gone to mingle with the other priests before the Fathers closed the ordination ceremony and they returned to their various barracks in an unhurried procession of dour pomp and grim solemnity. 

He'd spent the next seven years carefully nurturing their innocent courtship with small gestures of unspoken affection. Foregoing the last bite of his bread so that she might have that much more. Offering prayers for her safety and soul before each hunt and finding patches of loveliness in which they might meditate together, shoulder to shoulder with the sun on their faces. Briefly entangling their fingers as they passed in the corridors or marched over the burning sands. Taking her watches so that she might sleep. Plying her with these small favors as others might offer wine and roses. The love of children, some would say, but to him it had been as audacious as reaching for them sun, and on the horizon had been the tantalizing shimmer of something sweeter, the slow, lingering undulation of entwined bodies.

Then the call to Sola Mira had come, and he had been so close. Everyone had sensed that this was to be the last thrust of the smiting sword. Once the Queen was dead, her host would scatter and wither for want of guidance, and it would be a simple matter of sweeping up the dregs and pushing the few survivors onto reservations under pain of death. With no enemies to fight, they would be released from their obligations and free to build what lives they could among the grateful citizenry. They had tasted freedom on the dry air. Liese had been quietly ebullient, almost brazen in her affections as she patted his arm and dropped kisses onto his shoulder, and when he'd sat beside her and waited for the dawn, the moonlight had been the diaphanous white of bridal lace and he'd sworn he could smell roses on the gentle breeze. Hope. He'd been delirious with it, and he'd very nearly cupped her face in his blade-roughened hand and kissed her, drawn deeply of her until spots danced before his eyes and his bones felt too light inside his skin, but honor had demanded that he keep his vow of chastity until his freedom was duly won, and so he'd contented himself with brushing his reverent lips across her temple as her rosary beads dripped through her fingers like blood.

And then his brother had betrayed him, moved by cowardice and envious spite, and he'd languished in the bowels of the hive, feast for the eyeless, scabrous carrion crows that had pecked at him with needled mouths and reveled in his helpless agony. They'd howled with delight as he'd screamed and thrashed and pleaded for salvation from his god and from his brother and from Liese, and when he'd grown too weak to do anything but lie on the slab and blink blindly at the ceiling of the cavern, they'd lapped the tears from his face with eager, gelatinous tongues and dug their serrated claws into his weeping wounds. There had been time for regret there in the cold, forgotten dark, and as he'd felt the dim, guttering spark of their fangs sinking into him, he'd regretted that he had never kissed her that night, never declared his love against her nape and ground his ardor against her hip and enticed her to lie with him upon the sand, married in body and spirit if not in the eyes of the loveless, ascetic Church. If he had, he could have taken solace in their sacred union while his enemies slurped the life from his veins and shit it onto his twitching legs in cawing contempt. Instead, he'd been left with the skim of his lips across her temple and the distorted, wavering recollection of anonymous, rutting bodies seen through a whorehouse window. He'd retreated into himself in a last act of self-preservation, and as the last of his life had drained into the gullets of swarming, exultant vampires, he'd told himself that it was Liese who held him now. Liese, and the fluttering against his skin was merely the caress of the bedsheets as she loved him. 

So yes, he had looked, and yes, he had coveted and indulged in libidinous fantasy. He's been waiting for this for years, sustaining himself on the vague, faraway promise of smiles and skimming fingers and the warmth of a robed shoulder against his as he sat on scree and flint or stood watch on some comfortless hill for the protection of worthless, bovine fools who had never spared him a moment's compassion. He wants the happiness he had glimpsed in her face and felt in her touch. He wants the pleasure of connection and the ecstasy of union. He wants love and security and the wet heat of a cunt around his cock. He wants life in its fullest measure. He sees no reason to deny himself what she would have so willingly offered him long ago were it not for the vows wrung from their childhood mouths, when they had not understood what they were surrendering.

But look was all he had done. He could have taken her then, could have pinned her arms and torn her clothes away and buried himself within her while she bowed and whimpered. He had been stronger than her even before the Queen had gifted him her power; now she would be as a child in his grasp, easily subdued and easily broken. But he hadn't. Because she is sacred, and because he would have her surrender herself to him willingly, a bride bestowing a gift upon her groom in the privacy of the marriage bed, not a piece of dead-eyed chattel thrusting mechanically against his pistoning prick because she has no other choice. He would finish the song whose first notes had sounded in his heart when they'd stood forehead to forehead in the corner of the ordination hall. The Church has wrested so much from him and sullied the rest. They will not poison this.

He stalks into his bedroom and opens the wardrobe that stands to the left of the brass bed that dominates the room. Once, it had housed rough-spun flannels and chambray shirts and square-toed brogans stained with sand and handmade dresses meant to drape the sparse frame of a rancher's wife. Now it holds black, silk shirts and three pairs of black denim. There are empty hangers for his duster and the shirt and pants he now wears, and the bottom boasts space for his boots and a few pairs besides. And on the furthest wire hanger, incongruous and frumpy amid the austere elegance of his wardrobe, is a single flannel nightdress. It had belonged to the woman of the house once and should have been thrown away with the rest of the junk he'd purged from the cabin when he'd taken residence, but the familiar charged with the task had missed it. Lazy bastard. Still, it's an unforeseen stroke of fortune.

He plucks it from the hanger and holds it up for inspection. It's coarse and pilled and faded and too short, and unworthy of the flesh against which it will rest, but it is also his only option until he can send a scout for supplies.

_Love me, Liese, and I promise you'll have linens and silks._

He drapes the rag over his arm and returns to her bedroom to rap upon the door. "It's me," he calls. "I found a nightgown. Shall I leave it?"

A rustling from inside, and then the door cracks open to reveal Liese draped in a bedsheet. His eyes are drawn to her milky shoulders and chest and the alluring dip of her cleavage, and his pulse races. Sweating, writhing bodies flash across his mind. He shifts and sidles and swallows with a dry click. _That which is freely given tastes the sweeter,_ he reminds himself, and averts his gaze to the safer territory of the wall beside the door.

Soft fingers pluck the gown from his arm, and the door shuts in his face with a muted click. He shakes his head as though to clear it and takes a deep breath to steady his nerves, and he's about to turn for the kitchen when the door opens a second time and Liese emerges, clad in the ugly housedress. The hem scarcely reaches her shins, and she plucks irritably at the prickly fabric.

"Was the previous owner a gnome?" she grouses, and tugs ineffectually at the uneven hem.

"Just another stunted specimen of humanity." _And she tasted like copper and rust when I tore out her throat._

"She was a big fan of lavender, too," she mutters, and wrinkles her nose in distaste. 

He snorts in amusement. "Come on. You need to eat." He offers her his hand, and when she accepts, he leads her down the hall and into the small kitchen, where the familiar is busily preparing breakfast.

She stiffens at the sight of it. "It's doing the cooking?" she says dubiously, and her hand drops instinctively in search of a scythe left in the desert.

"It is," he agrees, and guides her to a chair at the square, wooden table beside the window. "And it's best you let it, unless you want burnt eggs and raw sausage. The only thing I was ever good at was toast. Maybe."

"How do I know it won't poison it?" she demands suspiciously, and her fingers curl around the hilt of an imaginary scythe.

"It won't," he answers serenely. "I eat what it cooks. If it does, it will be the last thing it ever does." The familiar, head bent to the sizzling, spitting sausages, quails, and its flabby, bloodless hand rises to finger its swollen throat. 

"That won't be much consolation to me if I'm dead on the floor," she notes prosaically. 

"Nothing in this house will do you harm." He sits down opposite her and slides his hand across the table to cover hers.

She eyes the familiar in dubious silence for a long moment, and then she turns to gaze out the window. The sun has nearly set, and the sky beyond the thin panes is a panorama of scarlet and gold and deepening violet. "Is this your usual timetable, then?" she asks quietly. "To sleep with the sun and rise at dusk?"

"More often than not, but I can sleep whenever I choose. You say that like it's such a bad thing. It's not. It's beautiful." He gestures to the tranquil landscape outside, to the sleepy rose of the heavens and the lengthening shadows of sagebrush that stretch spidery fingers across the patch of sand that serves as a yard.

"I suppose," she agrees. "It's just...different."

"There's no sin in difference, sister, no matter what the Church tells you. God loved diversity. Look at the world he created, at the paradise he gifted man before they destroyed it. The night was never meant to be unholy. It's men who made it that way, who, ashamed of what the Church told them was their sins, hid them in the dark. The night is innocent. It merely bears the sins of those who walk in it."

"'Of what the Church told them was their sins'" she repeats incredulously. "You deny the existence of sin?"

He shrugs. "Who's to decide what constitutes a sin? The Church tells us that sex is a sin, and yet the Lord himself commanded us to go forth and multiply. If sex were such an anathema to him, why would He command us to indulge in it? The Church says we should not covet, and yet they covet each soul that draws breath upon this earth with terrifying greed. Those who refuse to surrender it on bended knee are deemed unworthy, yet doesn't the Church command us to love even the lowest? It rails and thunders against gluttony, yet the Fathers grow fat from the comforts of their table while you starve. How many nights did we go hungry in their service, surviving on stale bread and gamey jerky while our enemies gorged on our blood? How often did we sleep on hardpan and shiver beneath rags while they slept in warm beds and called themselves God's warriors?"

"More times than I can count," she admits "Though I suffered less than I should have, thanks to you." She squeezes his hand

He sighs with the pleasure of it. "And what of love, sister?" He raises her hand and kisses the small, perpetually-bruised knuckles. "'And the greatest of these is love'. There it is, writ large in the Good Book itself and cast at us like an obligation whenever they needed us to die for their cause, but they were only too happy to punish us for it when it didn't suit their whims. I shared my water and my bread with you because I loved you, but if they had known that, they would have flayed the flesh from my bones and left me to hang in their cells until I was a mummified corpse. Their mouths preach love, sister, but their hands know nothing of it. There was nothing impure in it when I touched your hand or rested my head on your shoulder after a long march, but they would have had my blood for it. And yours. They're so afraid of the thing their god holds most dear that they forbid us to express it, to even dream of it. Tell me, when they told you I was dead, did they offer you comfort?"

She considers a moment. "No. They couldn't. You know the protocol. One does not weep for those martyred in Christ."

A contemptuous snort. "There was nothing glorious in my death. It was a cold, solitary agony that took days. Before I was remade, I died with vampire shit on my legs. I don't think that's the glory the Church intended."

A hastily-muffled squawk escapes her, and she leans forward to rest her forehead on the table. He watches her shoulders heave with suppressed emotion. He lets go of her hand to stroke the golden fall of her hair. It's free from its customary plait, and he relishes the softness of it beneath his fingers. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he murmurs, and it's true, though he cannot deny an ugly pang of satisfaction at her display. Priest hadn't so much as blinked when he'd accused him of letting him go, and the indifference had stung more than he cares to admit. He changes the subject. "Did you weep for me?"

"Of course I did," she retorts to her knees, and the pique in it amuses him. "It would have been a sin not to. You were my-" Her bony body shudders. "-were my brother. Chin tried to make it better, tried to stay with me and jostle my shoulder like you used to, but-"

"It wasn't the same," he finishes for her, and she nods, forehead rubbing the table like fine sandpaper. Her revelation surprises him, and he thinks of Chin the last time he saw him, blanched and dead and hanging from a makeshift cross in the dust-blown remains of Jericho with a hole in his chest where his heart had been. It had, he remembers now as he pets Liese's hair, tasted of wine and pomegranates and sustained him for days on his trek across the desert. The memory sits uneasily in his belly, sour as tainted blood, and he's glad when Liese speaks again.

"I made it back to the barracks before-" Her chest hitches. "There was an acolyte stripping your cot, and it looked so stark without the sheets, and I realized you were never going to sleep in it again, and I just-" An indrawn breath. "I made it to the laundry room before I just...couldn't. Priest saw me coming out, but he pretended he didn't."

"How magnanimous of him," he says drily.

She sits up. Her eyes are red, but her cheeks are dry. "Pity would have punished us both," she reminds him.

"I don't suppose they gave you any of my things? My spare rosary, my Bible?"

She shakes her head. "The acolyte bundled everything up and carried it off. I never knew what they did with it." She shifts against the memory and wipes the corner of her eye, gaze fixed on the steadily-encroaching shadow of a sagebrush.

_They blotted me from all memory. Just collected my sad handful of belongings like so much trash and made it disappear. On a cloud of ash, most likely. And then they forbad you to speak my name._

"And yet you still serve them."

She opens her mouth to reply, but is interrupted by the familiar, who scuttles over to place heaping plates of eggs and sausage on the table between them. Before Liese, it sets an egg in a hole.

"Eggy in a basket," it simpers, and offers her an obsequious, black-toothed grin. She eyes it in disgusted silence, and her hand inches toward the cutlery on the side of the plate.

"It likes to experiment," he says as it sidles anxiously beside the table.

"That's...reassuring."

"I thought a bit of whimsy would please the lady," it says eagerly, and rubs its hands together with a papery rasp.

"It would please me if you'd stop looming and see to your chores. You disturb my appetite," he growls.

It flinches as from a blow. "Yes, master, yes, yes," it mutters. It spares Liese a last lingering look and retreats to the relative safety of the stove.

He picks up his fork and spears a plump sausage. "What?" he demands, link dripping grease onto his plate as his fork hovers over the plain ceramic.

"You eat?" she says in surprise.

"Man cannot live by blood alone," he says, and drops the sausage onto his plate. "Besides, I like the taste." He spears another link. "Eat," he commands. "You're too thin, sister. I'd wager you've been living on bread and jerky for days."

She picks up her fork and selects a link of her own. "Just bread. We can't afford the meat for the jerky anymore, and when we can, the meat's already gone over." She takes a bite of sausage and sighs with pleasure as the spicy meat releases its savor.

"The Church still cares for its children, I see."

"The official word is that they've less need of us now that the vampire threat is past."

His face betrays nothing, but it takes an effort of will not to caper with glee. Even after the failed assault on the cities, the fools have learned nothing. No doubt they've told themselves that it was an aberration, the work of a mad rogue. Good. Let them think themselves untouchable. It will give the Queen time to replenish her host.

"Unofficially, there's word going around that the Church isn't paying its bills. The last few times I've gone into the city for supplies, vendors have complained of not getting paid. They might be too afraid to cut us off entirely, but they'll gladly give us the bottom of the barrel." The first sausage link has disappeared, and she reaches for the second. "Weevil-infested flour, stringy beef, rotten vegetables. Almost no sugar or coffee."

He groans in sympathy at that last. The familiar reappears with a pot of coffee, and it fills their cups with another idiot grin.

"And yet they still expect you to hunt and protect the citizenry of their fair city," he says as the familiar sets sugar, cream, and honey on the table.

She shrugs and eyes the array of condiments with ill-disguised longing. "There aren't that many hunts anymore. Just the occasional escapee from Shawshank. As for the citizenry, they're content to ignore us."

"My table is yours, Liese," he says, and nudges the sugar towards her. "As for the people, I wish I could say I was surprised." He clucks and shakes his head in feigned disappointment. "One would think they would be more grateful, especially after last year."

Her gaze sharpens at that, but she accepts the bowl of sugar and dumps three heaping tablespoons into her steaming mug. "They were, for a while," she says as she stirs her coffee. "Priest nearly started a panic when he showed up at the cathedral with a severed vampire head and dropped it at Monsignor Orelas' feet during Mass."

"Did he really?" he says, so delighted by the image that he momentarily forgets his hatred for his brother. "I'm sure Orelas enjoyed that."

She chuckles. "He was apoplectic. Started ranting and raving, accusing Priest of heresy and charlatanism. Threatened to excommunicate him from the Church. He tried, too, but he was overruled by the rest of the High Council. A trainload of smoldering carcasses carries more weight that raging, blind indignation, I suppose." She pauses to take a sip of coffee, and he can't suppress a smile when her eyelids flutter with appreciation.

"And Orelas tolerated such brazen insubordination?" The Monsignor had always been a hard man, cold and gaunt and unstinting as stone. Rumor had it that it was he who had advocated for the harsh punishments meted out to wayward priests and citizens, and it was hard fact that the prisons had swelled since he had assumed his seat at the head of the Council. He had served under Orelas from the time of his assumption into the Church to the time it had abandoned him in the tomb of Sola Mira, but he had met him only once, on the night of his ordination. It was he who had delivered the convocation and presided over the Mass, and it was he who had etched the tattoo into his forehead. There had been no flicker of mercy in the eyes that had looked down at him as the needles pierced his flesh and the blood flowed upon the altar, just a dispassionate, inscrutable blankness that had made his skin crawl.

"Not much else he could do," she says, and pierces the egg with the tines of her fork. "Not after he was ousted as head of the Council." 

He nearly chokes on his coffee. "Ousted?" he repeats incredulously.

She nods and reaches for a piece of toast with which to sop the yolk. "He put up one hell of a fight, but Chamberlain had both reason and public sentiment on his side, and the Council sided with him."

"And Orelas? Don't tell me he went quietly."

She snorts. "No. He couldn't be ousted completely, so now he sits in his seat and plots and festers. Most of the Council takes Chamberlain's part, but Orelas still holds sway with a few, and they obstruct whenever they can."

"Which might explain the funding problem."

Another snort around a mouthful of egg. "Might? Orelas will bring the Church down before he'll let it rest in someone else's hands. There are rumors of a schism brewing in the Council."

A schism within the Church presents so many possibilities, so many opportunities for exploitation. A Church fighting amongst itself is more easily broken. The Queen would be pleased.

 _Oh, sister, you have no idea of the gift you bring me,_ he thinks giddily, and hides an exultant grin behind his coffee cup. 

"Naturally, we're caught in the crossfire," she continues, oblivious to the thoughts whirling in his head. "The one good to come out of it is that Chamberlain believes Priest about the vampire threat. He's tried to increase funding and find new acolytes, but Orelas..."

"Is obstructing."

She jabs the egg-slick tines of her fork at him. "Mmm."

"Did Chamberlain order this hunt?"

She lowers her fork, chewing slowly. "Priest says he did."

"That doesn't sound like unbridled confidence."

She sighs and etches a pattern into the puddle of yolk on her plate. "I'm not sure what to think anymore. He's always been zealous-" He snorts at the polite understatement. "-but ever since the failed attack on the cities, he's been half-mad, obsessed with reports of a yellow-eyed walker in the desert. Khara believed him, but most of us didn't. Mariel flatly refused his orders to select acolytes for the hunt and threatened to lodge a grievance with the Council if he insisted on a hunt." She puts down her fork. "I wish she had."

"Did you believe him?"

"About a yellow-eyed vampire? No. I thought maybe it was just another bandit. One with some new kind of radiation poisoning."

"Then why did you go?"

"Because obedience is all I have left. Everything else died...a long time ago." Her throat bobs, and she retreats to the safety of the shadow cast by the sagebrush. "If I had known, I would never have brought them here. I thought we'd just chase ghosts long enough to soothe his mania and go home. They were children, Johannes, mere tools, just as we were. Did you have to kill them?"

"You brought them there to kill me, if you'll recall."

"They were no match for you. You didn't have to kill them," she counters.

"Should I have stood there and let them kill me to spare your conscience?" he retorts, and she recoils as though he's struck her. "If I had let them live, they would only have returned, older and more experienced. I have no intention of being the fox to the Church's hounds. I will kill them all if I have to."

"You didn't kill me," she points out. "I'm a greater threat to you than untrained children."

"You are a different matter," he says shortly.

"Why?"

"Because you are-" _My Liese,_ he finishes inside his head. "because you are."

"He says you killed Chin in Jericho."

"That's one lie he hasn't told."

"Brother, why? He was your brother. We all were. We grew up together, fought together."

"And yet none of you came for me!" he shouts, and the familiar cowers at his display of fury. "Not even you," he says quietly.

For a moment, she's frozen, eyes wide and lips parted in startlement. Then she takes a deep breath, then another, and rises from the table on wooden legs. Her chest heaves. "This is my hell," she moans. "This is my hell, and I deserve it." Then she's lurching from the kitchen, keening as she goes, hand pressed to her side.

He's so bewildered that he can only stare at her empty chair in confusion until the familiar takes a shuffling step after her. Then he's up and in pursuit. He finds her in the living room, clutching the doorknob in both hands and sagging heavily against the door.

"This is as far as I got," she says, and sinks to her knees, still clutching the door. "After you died, I got up in the middle of the night to come for you, but I couldn't make myself open the door. "I just...stood there. Like this. My legs wouldn't move. Wouldn't. Priest said they'd torn you to pieces, and I didn't want to see what they'd done to you, what had become of my-" She gasps and keens and sways drunkenly against the door. "-m-my brother. I was a coward. I did not come. I deserve to burn."

Her mouth opens in a soundless cry of anguish. She hangs from the doorknob for a moment, and then she sits down hard upon the floor and buries her fingers in her hair. She rocks back and forth. "I deserve to burn. I deserve to burn," she chants, thin and strangled, as though she can't coax air into her chest, which heaves and shudders convulsively.

He crosses the living room in two strides and drops to his knees beside her. "Hush, hush, Liese," he murmurs, and gathers her to him. She clutches him with panicky tightness, and her heart is a frantic timpani inside her chest. "I'm sorry, sister. Forgive me."

"I cannot be forgiven. I deserve to burn," she cries, and her eyes are wild inside her face. 

He cradles her against his chest, alarmed at her hysteria. Her body thrums with the effort of containing the guilt and grief raging inside her, and as she struggles to breathe, he's terrified that it will prove too much, that her heart will simply burst inside her chest. "No, you don't," he whispers into her hair and she trembles in his embrace.

"Yes, I do. It was my fault."

"No, it wasn't," he says firmly. "It was his. He should never have let go."

"You don't understand!" It's almost a wail. "You died because of me. He took you from me because I wanted...because I loved..."

Comprehension dawns. _Oh, sister..._

"No, sister. No, no, no. Those are lies of the Church. Love is not a sin. Never. I died because he was weak."

"But if I had come back..."

"Then you would have died. There were too many of them. If eight priests couldn't defeat them, what makes you think you could?"

"But-

"No. Let it go, Liese." He caresses her cheek. "Let it go."

"But the Church says-"

He gently grips her chin and raises her face to his. "There is no Church here. You're safe."

Her face crumples. "They wouldn't let me," she cries, and then the dam breaks. Her back bows with the force of the howl she releases. It's the howl of an animal tortured long past its endurance, mindless and unending. It frightens him with its intensity as she struggles to get closer, fingers clawing at the shoulders of his jacket. She's crying so hard that she's can't breathe, and her breath comes in great, whooping gasps as snot drips from her nostrils.

"'M sorry, brother," she sobs as her fingers scrabble in the leather. "'M so sorry."

"Ssssshhh, shhhh. I know. It's all right, Liese."

She sobs until she chokes and retches, and utters garbled apologies that harrow his heart. She gabbles of love and thwarted desire and hubris. And she wails. On and on. He can only hold her and hum tunelessly while the scalding tide spills from her and washes over them both in a smothering wave. The noise draws the familiar, who hovers uncertainly on the threshold between the living room and kitchen.

"Get out," he hisses as its muddy gaze falls on Liese's crumpled, shivering form. It has no right to see her like this, broken and helpless. No one does.

It's a long time before her cries taper into watery moans and pitiful whimpers, and as he rocks with her and soothes her into leaden bonelessness with his hands and presses kisses to her crown, the fear for her is replaced by a cold fury. They have tortured her, stained her with guilt meant for their hands, and denied her the feeble comfort of tears. They have convinced her that love is poison, crucified her for the sins of hope and love and compassion and then demanded that she serve them to her last breath.

"And I will give succor to your wounds and make you whole again," he murmurs as she sighs and snuffles in his sheltering embrace.

To the Church, he will show no such mercy. Not for the vampires, who see him as but a useful means to an end, but for her, and when the last of their spires have collapsed in pillars of ash and smoke and hypocrisy exposed, he will take her home. Not to the barracks, with its narrow beds and damp, grey walls, but to the river where the grasses grow lush and the mud is cool between your toes. He will set out lines for the fish and brush wedding rice from her hair, and in the fall when the leaves turn to fire, he'll watch her belly swell with promise.

"There is no Church here," he whispers, and hums a half-remembered lullaby from his life by the river, where the grass grows lush.


	5. Bonds of Servitude

Clusterfuck. It's undoubtedly a word of which the Fathers would disapprove, but it's also the only word to describe his ill-fated raid. Fourteen acolytes dead and four others wounded--two of them likely to die before the week is out. They'd been rattling on their cots beneath the baleful, exhausted gaze of Mariel when he'd left, ravaged by fever and infection and drowning in their own fluids. Odds are, at least one of them will be dead by the time he returns, shrouded in the same sorry linen beneath which they'd slept just a few nights before, their rosary threaded through their stiffening fingers.

The thought makes his stomach roll. He'd known there would be casualties; he'd fought the creature before, after all, had felt his immense power and the malice that radiated from him like heat from the sun-baked earth, but he had never expected so many. He'd thought to find him weakened from the explosion on the train, burned and twisted and deformed by bones never properly mended. He had even dared hope that perhaps the Queen had cast him out as punishment for his failure to take the city. 

A fool's hope. He should have ordered the acolytes to flee the moment the creature descended from the ridge in a graceful leap, should have known then how it would end as he'd stood in the glow of the fires and grinned at him with those sharp, white fangs. If he had, there might have been more survivors, a few more lives wrested from the greedy, snapping jaws of death, but he had been blinded, consumed by his hatred for the man he had once called brother and convinced that his plan would succeed, and so he had ignored the small, shrill voice of warning that had sounded in his head as he'd met that perversely serene yellow gaze and gambled the lives of those in his charge.

And lost.

 _Children, that's what she called them,_ hisses the restless voice of his conscience. _And that's what they were as he and his horde cut them down. Terrified, screaming, bleeding children who died with their faces in bloody sand and their entrails exposed to the stars. They were too young and too raw and too afraid, and why shouldn't they have been? You sent them into battle with little more than a rosary and a handful of self-defense techniques they'd practiced against burlap dolls and priests inclined to stern kindness. None of them had ever seen one vampire, let alone a score of them with fangs bared and claws outstretched and bloodlust burning in their scabrous veins. It could only have been a slaughter, and so it was. They were rabbits among wolves, and they died in a spray of blood and a chorus of unanswered prayers._

_They died for you._

An image arises in his mind of a young acolyte crawling across the sand, plait hanging in her face and arm tucked against her belly as she scrabbled to escape the jaws of a pursuing vampire. Fourteen, maybe fifteen, and crying for her mother as loops of intestine had slithered beneath her feebly-restraining arm. But no mother had come for her, only the fleshless, three-fingered hand of a vampire that had seized her by the ankle and dragged her back into the darkness. A sob and the crunch of collapsing cartilage and a glottal, bubbling moan, and then the ringing silence of the end.

_You found her later, though, didn't you? After the vampires had finally broken off the assault and skittered to the safety of their hive. She was sprawled just beyond the fire's fading light, neck snapped and throat laid open to the larynx and intestines puddled beneath her in a pool of blood and shit. She looked so young in the predawn light, a little girl who'd lost her way in the middle of a fairy tale and found the monster instead of the gallant knight or handsome prince with a glass slipper in his hand and a heart of gold inside his chest._

_She was somebody's Lucy once upon a time. Now she was dead in the dirt with her acolyte's cassock rucked up around her hips and her Church-issued underpants exposed to the world, and there'd be no one to shed a tear for her when you tossed her on the pile and sent her to the embrace of her absentee Father on a plume of reeking smoke. There was no dignity in her death, no glory, just a cortege of ants and scorpions crawling in the folds of her clothes and slipping into her eyes and nostrils like curious tourists and two dry-eyed priests to watch her burn. Glory, glory, allelu._

He thinks of Mariel, stumping around the nearly-deserted barracks with bowls of hot water and vials of bitter tincture that are so much placebo for the dying, grim and frazzled and aged ten years in a matter of days. She hadn't said a word when they'd staggered home with their tails tucked firmly between their legs and two shivering, hollow-eyed children with nothing behind their eyes and long gashes down their arms and legs. She'd simply stood aside and let them shamble in, wooden leg planted in the stone floor like a piton, and when he and Khara had dragged the dying survivors inside on a makeshift travois, she had merely pointed to the long, dim cloister of the dormitory.

 _I told you,_ her eyes had said as she'd pointed, jaw twitching as she surveyed the human carnage. _I told you, you arrogant bastard._ He had only looked at her, mute and pleading and ashamed, until she had turned her back on him with a decisive crack of her prosthesis and gone into the kitchen in search of rags and herbs with which to brew tinctures and make poultices. She's spoken to him since only as civility demands, too concerned with her failing charges to care about his smarting conscience and useless regret. He would not hear her when she had tried to warn him against his half-assed vengeance crusade, and so she would not hear him now when he came in search of belated absolution. 

Even Khara, whose loyalty he has never had cause to question, looks at him askance, as though he were a stranger she does not quite trust. Her mouth says all the soothing words that Mariel will not, assures him that he could not have foreseen a failure so catastrophic, but her eyes are sad and wary and shadowed with sleeplessness and grief and forever drifting to the two still forms lying side by side in the dormitory with sheets pulled up to feverish, sunken chins to hide the wounds that bleed and suppurate and fester beneath salves and bandages. She seldom eats and sleeps even less, and more often than not, he finds her on her knees in the small chapel, head bowed and rosary dangling from her clasped hands. She prays for Mariel, who is too old to be holding such unceasing vigils, and for those over whom she watches. She prays for peace and solace and the wisdom to accept His will. She prays for the lost, for the children who went so unwittingly and faithfully to slaughter, and for Chin and Dougal and Harmon. She prays for him, that he might find peace and let go of the anger that gnaws at his bones, the seething, affronted hatred that plagues his dreams and fills them with visions of Lucy lolling bonelessly in the monster's black-nailed grip, slender neck exposed to the bite of those poisonous fangs.

But there is no peace, only the memory of his wife lying broken and dead in the wreckage of the home his sense of honor had thrust upon her, hand outstretched toward the cellar door where she had tried to hide her most priceless treasure, and of his brother, apologizing for his weakness and slowly succumbing to the infection that had devoured him whole and reduced him to an incoherent husk who could only groan and shiver and claw mindlessly at the bedclothes while saliva glistened on his chin and his brain broiled inside his battered skull. Of Jericho, desolate and dead in the wake of the vampires' rampage, of empty rooms and shattered windows and the collapsed spire of the church, smoldering in the morning sun like a signal fire. Of shredded receiving blankets stained with blood and a pocket watching lying on a station platform. Of three cassocks flapping in the desultory breeze, and of three pairs of sightless eyes that seemed to gaze at him in fraternal recognition.

_Hello, brother. It's a shame you couldn't get here sooner._

_Your faith has failed you,_ the abomination that wore his brother's skin had crowed. He had meant it as a taunt, the final jubilant cry of the victor, and he'd hated him for it as he'd clung to the side of the slaloming freight car with bloody, throbbing fingers and prayed for the strength to hold on to Lucy as she swung wildly below him, but now, as he trudges through the filthy city streets and spits a fine mist of ash from his mouth, he wonders if his lost brother hadn't been speaking with a prophet's tongue, because he can find very little faith in his heart these days as he wanders the empty rooms of the barracks and lets half-hearted prayers tumble from his lips like drops of holy water as he passes by the neat rows of empty cots.

So much death, so much needless loss. Shannon. Owen. Chin. Dougal. Harmon. Fourteen children twice robbed of the lives they should have lived. And with each loss, his righteous faith had faded, shaken by the proofs of God's indifference. The Church taught that God protected the righteous and the innocent and blessed them with His favor, and once upon a time, when their numbers had been strong and he'd been young and righteous and possessed of the hope that he could go home again, he'd believed it, clung to it with the certainty of the just, but he's seen too much since then, too much pain and sorrow and ruin. Shannon's only sin had been to love him, and Owen had died for the shared blood in his veins. Chin and Harmon and Dougal had been priests, the righteous, smiting hands of God, charged with the administration of His justice, and yet He had turned His face from them and stopped His ears to their cries and left them to die in the sand of a forgotten settlement wiped from the face of the earth.

 _It's hardly the first time he's done that, now, is it?_ says a cynical voice inside his head, the voice of a smirking, cocksure young kid doubting the tall tale spun by the old duffer sitting down the end of the bar and washing the soot from his throat with a beer. _What about Johannes? There was nothing but pure, cold terror in his face in the instant his fingers slipped from your grasp and he disappeared down that godforsaken hole, the dawning realization that there would be no angels to bear him up. He was twenty-five and going to die alone in the dark, and his last words to you were a prayer stripped to the unglamorous bones._ Don't let go.

_But you did let go. You didn't mean to, but his hand was trembling and slick with sweat, and the vampires' hunger was stronger than your willingness to die. So when his fingers slipped from yours, you didn't lunge for his wrist or follow the howling mob down into the dark. Instead, you stood frozen in the entrance to the hive and watched him disappear, and until the day you met again on the roof of that train, you were haunted by the tears on his cheeks and the glint of his eyes from the depths of the fathomless darkness. Sometimes you dreamed of them and woke up in the middle of the night with a sob on your lips and your heart in your throat and your fingers curled around fingers two years in the ground. Or so you thought. You sat in the bed with the sweat-sticky sheets pooled around your hips and prayed for forgiveness that never came._

_You wonder how often he prayed while they ate him alive, sucked the life from his veins a drop at a time. You're pretty sure he did; most folks do when they're staring death in the face. And yet, for all the praying he must've done while they taunted and tortured him, all the pleas and supplications and Hail Marys he must have offered to the God he had so unfailingly served, it had made no difference in the end. Deliverance had not come, nor comfort, nor the eternal peace of God's embrace. Just an excruciating death at the hands of his enemies and transformation into an obscenity with no hope of heaven._

_The wages of secret sin, the Church would claim, God's punishment for the weakness of the human heart, but no man deserves to suffer so grievously, or to wander the earth forever sundered from God's grace for the sin of love. If offering your sister your ladle of water or an extra scrap of bread to sustain her on the long march and nurturing a tender, wistful hope for what can never be within your heart is grounds for eternal damnation, then what kind of God do you truly serve?_

_You tread perilously close to blasphemy,_ warns Monsignor Chamberlain inside his head, but he cannot help it. The Johannes he'd known had been a good man, gruff and reserved and impatient with indolence and stupidity, but quick to offer a terse word of encouragement to those who tried their best. He'd often tended the wounded along with Mariel and Khara, and he'd been swift to offer comfort when he'd confessed the story of Lucy and Shannon over shots of medicinal brandy one evening after vespers. The man he'd been before the vampires had refashioned him in their own blasphemous image would have been the first to join him in the search for Lucy, would have defied the pious hypocrisy of the Church without hesitation and would have died for them without regret. 

_As you would not die for him. Coward,_ sneers the voice of regret, and sweaty, short-nailed fingers dig into the flesh of his hands.

Surely such a man deserved a better death, a righteous death befitting his fidelity and sacrifice. And yet he had been forsaken by man and God alike and abandoned to the cruel taint of the vampires' venom.

And what of Liese, whose only sin had been to hesitate when the brother she had so fiercely loved had descended from the ridge to stand before her in ghoulish mockery of her grief? Disbelief and an old wound freshly open had slowed her mind, and bittersweet hope had stayed her hand, and for that, she had been spirited away to unknown torments.

_Whatever happens to her is on you. You knew she could never raise her hand against him, and even if you didn't, Khara was there to remind you. You never should have brought her on that raid. Mariel, with her infirmity, would have been of more use. She knew Johannes, had trained him and fed him and perhaps cared for him as she cared for all of her charges, but she didn't love him, and she wouldn't have wavered, wouldn't have stayed her hand against the killing blow. She is a soldier of the Church, first and last. Liese is a good priestess, but she serves it only because she must, because it had given her Johannes. Her will to fight died the day Johannes did, and she goes on living only because it is a mortal sin to lie down and die and she would not be robbed of her chance to see her brother again._

_Sometimes I wonder if he's burning in hell,_ she'd told him as she'd marched across the burning sand and looked anywhere but at the craggy spire of Sola Mira in the distance, and as he wends his way toward the equally-foreboding spire of the High Cathedral, he wonders what she'd thought as she'd knelt in the sand and gazed up at a face once so cherished and familiar.

 _Johannes._ Another beseeching prayer stripped of its pomp and vanity and cast to the heavens from anguished lips.

_Let me guess: he told you I was dead._

_I should have told her,_ he thinks as he steps over a pile of ash and sends them swirling through the air in his wake. _I should have told her the truth long ago._

 _She would have tried to go after him, tried to save him,_ Khara says reasonably. _She would have gotten herself killed._

_Better that than what probably happened to her at his hands. The man he once was never would have hurt her, but the evil that he has become knows neither love nor mercy. If she'd died then, at least she would have died knowing only love and hope and the courage of angels. Maybe she would have stopped the Queen from perverting him to her unholy ends and they would have died in each other's arms, granted in death the embrace they so longed for in life. Their bones would have mingled as their flesh never had, and they would be together in the eternal mercy of the Lord._

_As it is, she probably died screaming, beaten and tortured and violated by hands that had once loved her, had once brushed the hair from her temple in the flickering glow of a dying fire._

_Besides, I could've waited a few days, a week. Long enough that a rescue attempt would've been futile. I could have flouted the Church and let her grieve, let her shed the tears I saw her eyes. And I could have told her the truth of what he had become. She would have raged and cursed me to Hell and hated me for a bastard and a liar and a coward, but she could have made peace with his fate, come to reluctant terms with the ugly, unfair truth and been prepared when he dropped from the night sky with death at his back. She could have given him the mercy I could not, sent him to God with a single thrust of her blade into his unsuspecting chest. Instead, she crouched in his shadow like a dormouse in the thrall of an asp and offered no resistance as she was carried away like a spoil of war. Love remained, tenacious as the grave and the strangling vine, and overrode the evidence of her eyes. She saw only with her heart, and for that, she likely suffered a merciless, cruel death._

_All for the sin of love. Merciful is the Lord._

The spire of the High Cathedral rises high and spare above the city, wreathed in smoke and soot and ash that never stops falling to the streets below. It had been beautiful once, white and gleaming as it rose to the heavens in audacious tribute to God, but that was before the city had crowded around it with its shabby storefronts and low-slung tenements teeming with desperate souls driven behind the protection of austere walls of stone and steel. Now it's foreboding and black with grime and the sloughed skin of untold hands that had sought to find comfort and succor in its walls, and the tip of the spire juts from the smog like the bony spine of some dying, batrachian beast. The video screens mounted on every side are dark now, blind eyes with no soul to inhabit them, and in the dull, dusty light that stings his eyes, he can see a mottled stain the color of rust in the bottom corner of the south-facing screen.

 _Everything's gone rotten here,_ he thinks wearily. _Even the Church._

 _I have seen the other side, and do you know what I found?_ his fallen brother asks inside his head, reptilian, yellow gaze alive with gleeful malice.

"Nothing," he murmurs, and reaches for the cold, familiar comfort of his rosary beads.

Beggars clutch at his robes as he passes into the courtyard. Old, infirm, and starving, wracked with disease and hunger. Children with hollow eyes and distended bellies, and young widows with hair already gone grey at the temples. Grandmothers with black, rotten mouths and festering gums who breathe their decay into his face.

"Pray for me, Father," they plead, too far gone in their misery to fear him now. "Bless me, Father. Please!" Ragged fingernails in the fabric of his cassock and hard, leathery fingers patting his face. The shift and buffet of jostling bodies and the sour stink of despair.

"A piece of bread, Father?" cries a young woman with a scrawny child on her hip, and she holds out a hand rough with a lifetime of toil and covered in a layer of dust and grime that matches the rime around her fever-blistered mouth.

He has no bread to give her, and so he presses on, shouldering through the throng with his hood clutched tightly to his throat and his gaze fixed on the heavy, oak doors. There is a shrill caw of despair from behind him, and a small fist batters his back, but it's powerless as the starving woman who wields it, and so he does not turn, does not alert the guards who flank the doors to her impudence. He merely walks on, mute and unbending.

The guards say nothing as he approaches, inscrutable behind their black face guards. One opens the door to grant him entry. The other stands to attention with his rifle at his shoulder and that cold, eyeless gaze fixed on the milling crowd. The only evidence of humanity comes from the muffled rush and rattle of his breath behind his mask, the deep, plosive respiration of a sleeping dragon.

The inside of the cathedral is as clean as the outside is squalid and filthy. White marble floors shine beneath his booted feet, and the wooden pews glow with oil and polish. The altar is bare now, nothing but a table positioned beneath an enormous cross of black oak backlit by a row of recessed lights hidden in the walls, but he knows that soon it will be draped in a cloth of pristine white linen and arrayed with a golden chalice, a heavy, leather-bound Bible with gilded pages, a tray of Communion wafers, and a flagon of blessed wine. Chamberlain will descend from his lofty tower and cast admonitions and stale benedictions upon the gathered faithful like breadcrumbs. And because they can do nothing else, they will gather his words in their grasping hands and swallow them whole, let them burn in their aching bellies like rancid honeycomb until the next tolling of the bell, the next call to worship.

And so will he.

He turns from the altar and veers to an alcove to the left of the nave proper and the elevator that waits there. He waves his hand over the flickering bioscanner, and after a long, contemplative pause, the doors slide open with the shrill scream of gears and bearings in dire need of maintenance. He steps inside to the smells of sand and oil and wool, and the car sways and creaks under his weight.

 _It'd be just your luck to die in an elevator accident,_ the Johannes he had once known mutters inside his head, and he closes his eyes against the unexpected ache of loss. _You survive twenty years of fighting bandits and bloodsuckers, only to meet your Maker in a jumble of twisted metal because the good Fathers were too damn cheap to do routine upkeep on the elevator._

 _I have seen the other side, and do you know what I found? Nothing,_ he says again, and thin lips stretch in a triumphant, predatory leer.

He closes his eyes against the memory as the doors close with an exhausted wheeze and the elevator begins its creaking, palsied ascent, and anger burns and roils in his belly. He's so tired. He's tempted to sink to the floor and let the elevator carry him up and down until either the gears fail and he plummets to his final judgment with the whistling scream of tortured metal or the doors open to reveal the bewildered face of a monsignor come to the cathedral on his appointed rounds. But he's afraid that if he sits down, he'll never find the strength to rise again, smothered beneath the weight of his losses and bled dry by his countless sacrifices.

 _Come with me, brother,_ wheedles the perversion of Johannes inside his head. _Accept the blood of the Queen, and your life of sacrifice will be over._

He had refused the poisonous offer then, and he would resist the temptation now. His work is not yet done. Only God can release him from his bonds of servitude, and besides, he owes it to the acolytes and his fallen brothers to right the wrong that he had wrought when he'd let his brother slip from his grasp. And to Lucy and Shannon, who had loved a man so unworthy of it.

So he stays on his feet, and when the elevator grinds to a halt and spills him onto the topmost floor, he slips his hand into his pocket and fingers his rosary and wills himself down the corridor. The lush, velvet carpet whispers beneath his feet, and the incense that wafts from golden braziers that line the walls is as sweet and cloying as a courtesan's perfume. It's dizzying, and he breathes through his mouth to blunt its impact.

 _How do you know it isn't a whore's perfume?_ Johannes grunts, yellow-eyed and malevolent. _There have been rumors for years. Look at them, brother, Orelas and all the rest who blithely sent us to die. Do they look like they've shared in our poverty, living on crumbs and watery broth and sleeping on bedrolls? Their hands are soft, and they're surrounded by luxury, safety. Look around you. Velvet carpets and polished walnut doorframes, incense in golden braziers to soothe their nerves and ease their headaches. It's do as I say, not as I do, my friend. It's hardly a stretch to think they've indulged their withered old cocks as thoroughly as their bellies while we've been left to eat bug-infested bread and rutting into our hands under the cover of night and begging forgiveness on our callused knees from a God who was never really there._

He hastily pushes aside the unwholesome image of craggy Monsignor Orelas bucking between the pale thighs of a young supplicant with her bodice tugged around her middle and her modest panties dangling from one smooth calf and knocks on the door at the end of the hall, the thick wood smooth against his knuckles. "It's Father Matthias, Your Grace," he calls.

A muffled voice from within, "Enter, my son."

He enters and closes the door behind him. The room is dim, lit only by the light of a single desk lamp, and Monsignor Chamberlain sits behind his desk and gazes out the small, grimy window at the city below.

"There are more every day," he says absently, and strokes his rounded chin.

Matthias drops to one knee and genuflects. "Your Grace," he says, and bows his head.

The monsignor flaps an impatient hand at him. "Up, up. There's no need to stand on such formality. This isn't the High Council." A creak as he rises from his chair and shuffles around his desk to rest a hand on his shoulder.

"Gratitude, Your Grace," he says, and rises.

Chamberlain pats his shoulder and gestures to a pair of chairs separated by a small wooden table that holds an empty taper, a Bible, and a tarnished silver bowl of fruit. "Sit," he commands. When he does as he is told, the monsignor follows suit and settles himself into his seat with a groan and a flourish of his long, black robes. "I'm old," he says dolefully, and idly massages a knee.

Politeness would demand that he deny it, but he can't. He looks old, shrunken and stooped and oddly vulnerable without his hat to cover his balding scalp. A year ago, he had been hale and vital and ruddy, with bright eyes and a purposeful stride. Now he's hesitant and dull-eyed and pinched, as though the vampires against which he has so long set himself have found him at last, have slipped into the heart of this holy citadel and sucked the vitality from his veins.

 _Well, your grim tidings are hardly going to help matters,_ he thinks morosely.

"Fruit?" Chamberlain asks, and waves at the assortment in the bowl.

His stomach rumbles greedily at the sight of rosy apples, oranges, and plump grapes, but he shakes his head. He's hungry, painfully so after days of nothing but stale bread and diluted fish broth, but it wouldn't be right of him to glut himself while his sisters at the barracks starve and scrimp and share their meager provisions with the broken and dying.

"Are you sure? As the Word tells us, man cannot live by bread alone."

 _You certainly don't,_ the creature that devoured Johannes grunts. _Look at it, brother. So fresh, so ripe, so much better than anything left to the pathetic rabble below. I bet it tastes like honeycomb on the tongue. How does that happen, I wonder? They get the first pick of the incoming shipments, I bet, siphon off the choicest bits for themselves and leave everyone else to scrabble for the rest like starving curs. When's the last time you had an apple that wasn't soft with rot?_

He ignores the uncomfortable question. "I bring news," he says.

The monsignor shifts in his chair. "The raid?"

He nods and rubs his palms together. His hesitation doesn't go unnoticed by the monsignor, whose gaze sharpens inside his haggard face.

 _Still has his wits, then,_ he thinks with dull relief. "There were losses," he hedges.

The gaze sharpens further, and Chamberlain sits forward, elbows on his knees. "How many?" No paternal bonhomie and rueful commiseration now, only the stern, implacable voice of the Church.

"Fourteen acolytes."

"Fourteen," he sputters, and sags in his seat. "My-" He stops himself before he commits the sin of blasphemy and scrubs his face with his palm.

"Two more are likely to die before the week is out."

Chamberlain groans and presses the heel of his palm to the center of his forehead.

"There's something else."

"Do I want to know?"

 _No._ "We lost a priestess. He took her."

He moans and buries his head in his hands. "Which one?" he asks, eyes squeezed tightly shut.

"Liese."

"Is there any chance she's still alive?"

He thinks of the creature on the train, sneering and bitter and ravaged by hate. Of the sole of his boot grinding his fingers underfoot as he swung from the side of the freight car. He thinks of Chin, hanging on a wooden cross with a gaping hole in the center of his chest where his heart had been. He thinks of bloody receiving blankets strewn on empty cabin floors. Of pocket watches twinkling forlornly in the early-afternoon sun.

_You let go._

"No," he says at last. 

"Damn," he breathes, and straightens with a visible effort. "Chin, Dougal, Harmon. Now Liese. That's four priests since you started this crusade of yours."

"I didn't start it," he protests. "That thing took my daughter."

"Whom you rescued," he points out. "And yet, this creature you claim you saw is still pursuing you, still attacking. Why?"

"I don't know. Maybe as revenge for me stopping his invasion of the city. And it might not be about me at all. It might be another of the Queen's schemes. Or it might be an attack against the Church itself. He was one of us once."

"Do not speak that heresy here," Chamberlain warns darkly.

"It's the truth," he replies stubbornly.

"Truth or not, if so much as a whiff of that gets back to Orelas, I won't be able to stop him from moving for excommunication. You'll be lucky if he doesn't have you burned at the stake." He braces his palms on the armrests of his chair and heaves himself upright. "I don't know about you, but I need a drink," he announces wearily, and trudges behind his desk to retrieve a bottle of brandy from the bottom drawer of his desk.

 _Ah, my, my,_ clucks Johannes. _Yet another hidden vice._

Chamberlain unscrews the cap and fills two shot glasses, and then he sets the bottle on the desk and carries the glasses to his seat. "Here," he says, and thrusts one at his face.

He considers refusing in deference to his vows, but he thinks better of it and accepts it with a nod. The amber liquid burns going down, and a welcome heat blossoms inside his chest. He closes his eyes and drains it to the last drop, and when he's finished, he sets the empty tumbler on the table beside the Bible. The irony of the juxtaposition is not lost on him as the monsignor resumes his seat, nor on the corrupted Johannes that seems to have made himself at home inside his head.

 _The Church in a nutshell,_ he crows. _Preach one truth and practice another._

"I thought you might need that," Chamberlain says, and takes a sip of his own drink. Another swallow, bigger this time, and he smooths his robes over his knees. "Whatever its motives, it's not a battle we can afford to fight," he says, and grimaces at the whiskey's smooth burn. "We're cut to the bone as it is, and the loss of so many acolytes won't help."

"That wasn't my intent."

"Of course it wasn't, but the truth is the truth, no matter what road you took to reach it. These losses are crippling." He snorts and studies the contents of his glass. "Orelas is going to have a field day." He drains the last of his brandy and lowers his glass and spins it in a slow, lazy circle as it dangles from his fingertips. "He's been telling anyone who'll listen that I'm a reckless incompetent unsuited to leadership, and this certainly won't hurt his case. Between this and the budget shortfalls, I'll be lucky to last the year."

"The budget isn't your fault. Orelas and his cronies have been obstructing every proposal you've made." He runs his fingers over his short-bristled scalp. "And this massacre wasn't your fault. It was mine. I never should have tried to fight him with acolytes. Mariel tried to warn me. So did Liese, but I was so determined to end him... This is the fault of my pride."

"You wouldn't be the first to fall to that sin, Father," Chamberlain murmurs. "Unfortunately for me, that makes no difference. All the people know is that the soup kitchens and almshouses are short on supplies and the wall is falling into disrepair. They don't know why, and they don't care. All they want is for things to get better, and if they don't, I'll be the one they blame. Why shouldn't I be? It's my face on the screen. Once they find out that I let a priest Orelas suspected of charlatanism get a priestess and fourteen acolytes killed haring after yellow-eyed phantoms, they'll be clamoring for my dismissal. And Orelas will no doubt be there to step in and restore piety and order."

"Phantom? How can you doubt his existence when I've just told you that he killed fourteen acolytes and a priestess?" he demands hotly. "If you doubt me, just ask my daughter."

"Who has every reason to support your story," he points out sagely. "Blood, is after all, thicker than water. And the bonds of holy servitude. Besides, it doesn't matter what I believe. It matters only what they believe, and if given the choice between believing in a corrupted former priest turned into a vampire or a priest who snapped under the pressure of his office, which do you think they will choose?" He offers a wry, humorless smile. "I know which I would choose."

So does he. He threads his fingers behind his nape and bows his head, elbows propped on his quadriceps. "Whether they believe in him or not, he's still out there. I have to stop him. If I don't, he won't until he brings the city to its knees." An image arises in his mind of Jericho despoiled, a ghost town on the burning wastes.

"The Church can offer you no more aid," Chamberlain says quietly. "We have none to give."

Matthias raises his gaze, exhausted and stricken. "Then what would you have me do? He has already killed four priests. What do you think he will do if he reaches the city?"

"Do you have someone you trust implicitly? Someone you trust with your life?"

He thinks of Khara, stalwart and strong and fierce. "Yes."

"Take them if they can fight. If they can't, then you're on your own. No further help will come from the Church. No reinforcements, no supplies. If you find it, you are to kill it and bring me its head as proof of deed. You are not," Chamberlain says drily, "to parade it about on public display. You are to bring it to me or to the High Council itself. Is that clear?" An unbending schoolmaster to an equally-obdurate pupil.

He nods. "Yes, Your Grace."

"Good." Chamberlain rises painfully from his chair, shot glass in hand. "Leave as soon as you are ready. I won't expect to hear from you until your return.

Matthias rises in turn. "Gratitude for your mercy, Your Grace," he says. Protocol is protocol, and no matter the spicy sweetness of brandy on his breath. He inclines his head and turns toward the door, and then he hesitates. "Your Grace?"

Chamberlain, halfway around his desk and reaching for the bottle of brandy, pauses, broad, large-knuckled hand hovering over the slender neck. "Yes, Father?"

"If I do find Liese alive, what should I do with her?"

Chamberlain's hand falls to the bottle, and he pours himself another shot. He does not look at him when he answers. "If she is still with it, then she has likely been tainted by its poison. You know what to do."

"And if she isn't?" he presses. He has lost so many to this war. He doesn't want to lose another.

"Then she is an apostate and should be treated as such," Chamberlain says coldly, and he sounds so much like Orelas that he flinches.

 _Love is sin, and the wages of sin is death,_ he thinks miserably.

"It would be a mercy," Chamberlain assures him, and tosses back the shot.

He has no answer to that that wouldn't smack of insolence and insubordination, and so he merely blinks in acknowledgment and slips away before the monsignor can say anything else. 

_There is no honor in this,_ Liese says mournfully as he reaches for his hood, and though they have seldom agreed in the years since he emerged from the depths of Sola Mira without her heart in tow, he cannot disagree. There is no honor here, no righteousness, only more death and sorrow and another pressing stone to chafe against his already-overburdened conscience like a misplaced rosary bead. He pulls his rosary from the pocket of his robes and presses the cool, black beads to his lips in mute supplication.

 _Give me your strength, O, Lord,_ he beseeches as he hurries to the waiting elevator.

There comes no answer from the heavens, just the snarl of a fallen brother. _I have seen the other side, and do you know what I found?_

"Nothing," he murmurs against the beads, and steps into the elevator.

 

While his erstwhile brother wrestles with his conscience and his faith, he hurries along the warren of winding passageways to the heart of the hive. He's here to see the Queen, to bring her news of his victory and the unexpected treasure that has fallen into his grasp. In truth, he should've told her sooner, but he's been preoccupied with Liese, stunned by this unexpected turn of fortune, and he hasn't dared leave her alone, lest he return and find it all but another wistful dream.

Liese. She'd been sleeping when he'd left her, burrowed beneath the blankets on his bed and snuffling softly into the pillow. He'd lingered as long as he could, had propped himself on one elbow and studied her as she slept and reached out to trail his fingertips over the lines of her body beneath the coverlet. The softness of her cheek. The even rise and fall of her ribs. The hard jut of her hip. The curve of one thin knee. So fragile and so lovely and lying in his bed. An exquisite vision, and he'd savored it as his cock had twitched and pulsed inside his pants, heavy with desire not yet realized.

But soon. Once the Queen has given him her blessing, he will fly home to begin his suit in earnest. He will rouse her from her slumber with kisses and caresses and dispel the lethargy that has held her in its soporific grip since that awful evening when he'd sat on the parlor floor and listened to her howls of grief, had cradled her to him while she sobbed and keened and clutched at him like a terrified child. She'd been feverish by the time her misery was spent, limp and delirious and shuddering, and she hadn't protested when he'd picked her up and carried her into his bedroom and put her in the brass bed. She'd simply blinked at him, hair mussed and face wet with tears and eyes ringed with exhaustion, and as before, she had reached for him in silent entreaty. And as before, he could not deny her. He had shed everything but his shirt and underclothes and crawled in beside her. She had turned at once into his embrace, a warm coal against his flesh. He'd crooned and caressed her until she'd gone slack with sleep, and while she'd dreamed, he'd let his avid gaze wander over the enticing swell of her breasts and tried to ignore the persistent, eager jut of his cock as it strained against the fabric of his underpants.

 _Soon,_ he'd told himself as he'd watched her golden eyelashes flutter, and an image had arisen in his mind of those breasts bared to his gaze and upthrust toward his lapping, sucking mouth as he rocked inside her. Sweet as wine, it had been, and he had not been surprised to wake in the night to find his boxers sticky with drying seed.

The memory stokes the banked flame, and his lips peel back from his teeth in an unconscious snarl as his cock throbs with a familiar ache. He pushes the lascivious thought of Liese's ripe breasts aside and ducks into a passage black as pitch. As a man, he would have been hopelessly lost, but now he moves easily into the depths, guided by the ephemeral glow of the lichen that blossoms on the cave walls and the bioluminescence of the worms and grubs that dwell in the lightless places of the earth.

Down and down and down, a pilgrim returning to the place of his rebirth. The air is cold and damp and piquant with the scent of bile and excrement. The Queen is nesting yet another brood, and the walls and floor are slick with the beginnings of a nest. Claws skitter on the walls and ceiling, accompanied by the furtive, papery rustle of scabrous hands and feet on damp sandstone. Sentry drones, and they've caught his scent. They shriek in welcome as he enters the chamber of his remaking, and he grins and tips his hat in salute.

_Hello, boys. I've come to see the Queen._

They scamper ahead of him to the center of the room, heralds presenting him to the lady of the manor, and release a high, ululating howl. He stops in front of the slab on which he'd slowly bled to death, careful not to look at it. He is grateful to the Queen for the life she has given him, but the means of its acquisition still haunt him, still drive him from his dreams with the sheets puddled on his thighs and a scream lodged in his throat. He still remembers the languid burn of their fangs in his flesh and the cruelty of their hands as they harrowed his flesh and tugged savagely on his limbs for the sheer joy of it, screeching in orgiastic glee at his every ragged, pleading scream. Sometimes he still smells the jungly aroma of piss and shit on the backs of his knees, still feels the sticky warmth of blood dripping from his fingers as he lies on cold rock and begs for the release of death. Sometimes the terror still comes for him.

She's inside his head before he ever sees her, the sibilant, rasping hiss of dead leaves rattling across a tomb. _Ah, my child, you've returned to me at last._

 _My Queen,_ he says reverently, and bows his head in deference. _Forgive me the absence. I have been busy. And I have news that will please you._

_Oh?_

_The priest who thwarted our plans to attack the city has renewed his pursuit._

_And this is to our favor?_ she replies with cool skepticism.

_No doubt the soldiers informed you of our successful attack?_

_You killed inexperienced children,_ she answers dismissively, and he blinks, stung. 

_They're children who will never grow to be a threat,_ he counters defensively.

 _Indeed, and for that I am well pleased,_ she soothes. _But that fact remains that two priests survived._

_Yes, but...I have the third._

Movement from the narrow passage to the east, and the scrape of claws over sandstone, harsh as an indrawn breath. _Where is it?_ she demands eagerly.

_I have her._

_Why did you not bring her here?_ Confusion and a hint of anger, sour wine and old blood and blackened flesh, and unease settles in his belly.

He hesitates, and she slips into his mind like oil and smoke to rifle its contents. He could resist, but it would only end in pain, and so he submits, hands curled into fists to still their trembling.

 _Ah,_ she coos. _You found her, the one who so preoccupied your thoughts._

_Yes._

_And your desire has not changed?_

_No. Now that she is here, it has only grown greater,_ he admits, and swallows with an audible click.

Her fingers dance across his mind, dry and chitinous and febrile, and his soul recoils. But resistance is pain, and so he endures, turns from the helpless scald of shame as she plucks the vision of Liese yielding herself to him from his mind.

Soft, insectile laughter as she holds the slender, golden thread up for her leisurely inspection. _My child,_ she muses fondly as the gossamer strand of his dream winks and shines with ephemeral inner light. _Your desires have always been so simple, so unassuming._

_Does that disappoint you?_

_On the contrary, I find it refreshing. So many people have come before me seeking riches and glory and power. But you...your only desire is this woman._

_She is..._ He trails off, reluctant to give voice to such vulnerability.

But he can hide nothing from her prying eyes. _Your sweetest sister. Your love,_ she finishes for him.

 _Yes,_ he croaks. _Yes._ His throat constricts with the force of his longing.

_And yet you have not yet taken her?_

He shifts uncomfortably. _I wanted it to be willing._ His cheeks burn.

She laughs indulgently. _Of course you did. Such a romantic at heart. Would you still sow your seed within her?_

 _Is it possible?_ he asks, and desire simmers restlessly beneath his skin, an itch he cannot soothe. _The Church teaches that no life can come from death._

 _The Church,_ she sneers. _The Church is a haven of cowards and fools who fear the world and therefore know nothing of it. Besides, you're not dead. You're alive, more alive than any of them. Of course you can create life if you desire._

An image arises in his mind of Liese with a rounded belly and milk-swollen breasts and a rosy blush in her well-fed cheeks. There would be no wedding rice in her golden hair, no fish eaten from tin plates, no love beneath the sheltering autumn leaves, but he could love her, could map her in the depths of his brass bed and build a home with her in the desert. He could fill her womb with his seed and watch it swell with his get, and when the time came and his child came into the world in a rush of blood and water, its first cry would be the greatest act of defiance against a Church that had denied him everything and attempted to blot his memory from the earth. It would grow plump and strong at its mother's nurturing breast, and when the might of the Queen brought the Church to its knees, ruined and pitiful and broken, he would parade through the streets with them at his side, and before the Church Fathers were sent to their just reward on the cross they so ardently worshipped, he would fuck Liese on the altar of the High Cathedral and sow another child in her belly.

_You would give me such a gift?_

_Did I not promise you such when I welcomed you home? I am not so faithless as your former masters._

_Thank you._ Tears of gratitude burn in his eyes.

 _Will she serve me?_ she asks.

He thinks of Liese, of her long-stifled grief spilling from her lips like vomit, of her fingers clawing at the fabric of his duster. Liese, who has spent three days doing nothing but sleeping and eating, as though her body, relieved of the yoke under which it has so long and thanklessly labored, has retreated into a protective cocoon. Liese, who reaches for him with outstretched arms whenever he is near, and who follows him from room to room and curls in upon herself to doze while he tends to the business of the day.

 _They wouldn't let me,_ she wails inside his head.

 _She can be turned,_ he answers.

 _Good. See that she does not oppose me. Should she do so..._ She does not finish the thought. There is no need. The rest of it settles against his skin, a promise and an unspoken threat.

_Yes, my Queen._

A cold, rugose finger strokes his cheek. _Go on, now, my good and faithful servant,_ she croons. _Fly to your precious love and the fulfillment of your every desire. Go to the life that was yours by right before the Church stole it from you._

He turns his lips to the finger that he can sense just out of sight and presses a kiss to the pointed tip. "Thank you, Mother," he whispers around the lump in his throat, and then he turns and flies back the way he had come, back to Liese and the sweet promise that awaits him in her arms.


	6. The Ecstasy of Apostasy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains minor bloodplay.

She sits on the front steps of the cabin and watches the sun sink below the horizon. Heat rises from the desert sand and the sagging wooden steps, and a scorpion crawls sluggishly across the yard, barbed tail held over its back like a furled standard. From inside the cabin comes the clatter of domestic industry as the familiar cleans up the breakfast dishes.

_Never thought I'd get used to breakfast at dusk._

But she is getting used to it. Three weeks on, and she's gotten used to rising with the sun's descent and taking a bath while the warmth and light bleed from the sky and the familiar bustles about the kitchen with the busy clatter of pots and pans. Sometimes, before the last vestiges of sleep fall away and wakefulness comes with its cold clarity, she thinks it's Mariel, stumping around the barracks' tiny kitchen and cobbling together breakfast from handfuls of mealy flour and stale coffee. Then the smells tickle her nostrils, frying bacon and chicory coffee and ham sizzling on a cast-iron skillet, and she opens her eyes to this strange, new world in which she finds herself.

She thinks of them as she sits down to breakfast, her brother and sisters who scrounge and scrape and ease their gnawing hunger with hardtack and watery coffee and the occasional handful of trail mix dry as millet. They've surely never tasted anything so delicious as what the familiar sets before her every nocturnal morning--eggs with yolks so fresh they're almost orange; bread with jam and real butter; bacon and fried ham, even country-fried steak; French toast, blood oranges and sweet, ripe pears and blackberries topped with cream. The familiar, it turns out, is quite the gourmand, and it delights in flaunting its skills.

This morning's offering had been country ham with sawmill gravy, fresh buttermilk biscuits, and a three-cheese omelette with sausage and peppers, and Johannes had insisted she eat every bite. He'd sat at the table, fork in hand, and hawked her until she'd cleared her plate, and then he'd plied her with more orange juice and a slice of melon. He would've given her more if she hadn't pressed her hand fingertips to her lips and threatened to regurgitate everything onto his lap. She needed to eat, was too thin, he'd said, and he'd been determined to put meat on her bones and color in her cheeks.

He's been like that since she got here, hovering and mothering and gently obsessing. He checks her stitches every morning and washes them with a damp cloth, and he chivvies her to breakfast and feeds her far more than a stomach accustomed to starvation rations can hold. He bundles her in blankets and watches her nap, and sometimes when she momentarily surfaces from the deeper waters of sleep, she feels the skim of his fingers on her forehead and in her hair and the soft warmth of his lips on the shell of her ear. Sometimes he adjusts the covers and tucks them snugly about her, and sometimes the divan or bed sinks beneath his weight as he sits beside her and rubs her feet and draws a reverent hand over her ankles and calves.

 _Not just your ankles and calves,_ says the prim, disapproving voice of Priestess Mariel. _Lately, he's gone as high as the spar of your hip, and I wager he'd go further if he weren't worried about jostling your rib. He's getting brazen. He's even let his fingertips trace a delicate line along your thigh._

 _Yes,_ she says mutinously, _and I liked it._ It's petulant and childish, a toddler thumbing her nose at her authoritarian parent, but it's also the truth. She _had_ liked it. He'd slipped his hand beneath her nightdress as they'd lain in his bed, and his callused, short-nailed fingertips had grazed the sensitive flesh of her inner thigh. She'd been so surprised that she'd gasped and arched against him, and he'd laughed low in his throat and nuzzled her neck.

 _Are you all right, sister?_ he'd asked with sly innocence, and drawn a languid circle on her trembling flesh.

 _I'm fine, brother,_ she'd croaked, and swallowed, but she hadn't been fine. She'd been too hot, and possessed of the unseemly impulse to spread her legs and press into his hand, to ease the simmering ache his touch had ignited between her legs. She'd held her breath while those familiar fingers teased and stirred and his breath blew warm against her ear and he pressed open-mouthed kisses along her jawline, and her cunt had been slick with want.

 _Then why didn't you?_ demands the voice, harsh and inquisitorial. _If you liked it so much, wanted it so much, why didn't you part your thighs and offer yourself up to him like a wanton whore? It's what you wanted; it took all of your strength not to moan like one, not to writhe beneath his hand like a harlot in heat. And he wanted it just as much. It was in his ragged breath and the insistent press of his sinner's cock against the swell of your buttocks, the slow, sinuous grind of it in concert with his fingers. If you'd let him, if you'd rolled onto your back and raised the hem of your new nightdress, the one sewn by a much more chaste hand than the one clutching the pillow, he would have mounted you without a second's hesitation and ridden you until your apostasy was complete._

She squirms and swallows with a dry click. The skin of her thighs prickles and flushes at the memory of that forbidden caress, and her thin, grey underpants chafe sensitive flesh. The want rises to renewed life, and she longs to press and rut against unseen fingers. She takes a deep breath and fixes her gaze on the rapidly-darkening horizon in a futile effort to dispel the memory of his cock rubbing frantically against her ass.

 _So why didn't you?_ the harping voice needles relentlessly. _If the mere recollection can stoke such obscene desire within you, then why did you resist?_

Because she is still a priest. It is the only life she has ever known, the only path she has ever walked, and as unforgiving as it has been, it is familiar. She knows its rhythms and its rituals. She can recite its prayers and liturgies by rote, can recite entire passages from the book of exorcism and the _Malleus Maleficarum_. She can bless wine and holy water and administer last rites to the dying. She can irrigate and stitch wounds. She can fell familiars and their masters with a practiced swing of her blades. The swing and clack of rosary beads is as familiar as a lullaby, the thread of them between her fingers as intimate as a lover's touch. If she is not a priest, then she is nothing, a creature of dust and bone and pith, useless and unwanted, as irrelevant as the rusted artifacts that litter the desert sand and whisper of a time before the vampires and the cruel, throttling grasp of the Church.

 _And because you are afraid,_ whispers the sibilant voice of conscience, soft and insidious as the grains of sand that gather in the folds of her cassock. _The last time you allowed yourself to love, to dream, he was wrested from you and cast into the depths of Sola Mira, twisted and tormented and transformed into what he feared and hated, an abomination for which there can be no forgiveness. You're afraid that if you surrender to this darkest desire of your heart, you will damn him a second time, lead him into sin and remove all hope of redemption._

 _It is already too late,_ reasons the voice of pragmatism. _For him and for you. The Church will never pardon him for the taint that flows through his veins. To them, he will ever be a blasphemy, a perversion wrought in the image of the godless. He could go to them with regret in his heart and penitence on his lips, and they would still shun him, still bind him and torture him and break his bones in the name of purification. You remember the cruelty with which he was treated as a boy, when he was beaten and broken and trussed up in the name of discipline and the Lord's righteous love. If they could be so merciless to a child anointed with God's grace, what do you think they would do to him now that he is no longer quite human?_

 _He is my brother,_ she protests forlornly, and scuffs the toe of her boot in the sand.

 _To you,_ the voice agrees. _He has loved you and coddled you and fed you the choicest bits from his table. He has cradled you in his arms and stroked your hair and murmured your name as though it were the sweetest truth he knows. You look at him as he sits across the table at breakfast and see the man who tended your hurts after hunts, and who took your watches so you could sleep. You see the man you once embraced in the secret corner of the ordination hall. His eyes have gone the predatory amber of a cat peering from the long savannah grass, but in them, you yet see love, see the shy, gentle soul who hunkered with you behind an outcropping near the entrance to the hive and squeezed your hand in implicit, hopeful promise. To you, he is as he ever was, Johannes, your brother. Your love._

_To the Church, he was never Johannes, or even a man. He was only a tool, a weapon forged to carry out its will. Now that he has been warped and bent to the purpose of the vampires, they have no use for him, no remembered fondness. He is just an enemy, a threat to be met by the Lord's scourging might. He is apostate, lost to God and obscured from His sight by the corruption in his blood. They will curse him and hunt him, and if they find him, they will kill him._

_As to the matter of sin, that, too, is out of your hands, child. He turned to sin long ago, perhaps the instant the vampires' poison infected his heart. He has kidnapped and pillaged and killed. He has confessed as much without a pang of remorse. He admitted to murdering three former brothers. The right of survival, he claims, and yet there was no grief when he spoke of them._

_Why should there be?_ asks a ruthless, wounded voice inside her head, an eight-year-old boy with blood dripping from his nose and his split lip and his small, thin body shivering from hunger and cold and pain from the bruises and welts that marred his pale body. _None of them helped me when they were beating me and flogging me raw in the name of God and letting me starve in some forsaken cell. They all turned from my suffering, rationalized it as a sacrifice necessary to ultimate victory, pretended not to see me when I staggered to morning vespers with a swollen face or pissed blood in the training yard. They offered no water for my parched lips, no food for my cramping belly, no ointment for my wounds. They left me to die, and then they forgot me. Why should I mourn them when they never spared a thought for me?_

 _We were all tested,_ she reminds him, and shifts on the step.

 _Not as I was,_ he spits, and tears fill his hollow eyes. _Don't be a liar, sister. You were there. You saw._

She was. If she closes her eyes, she can still see the blood, can still hear the echo of the lash against his skin as he bucked and lunged against the whipping post, can still hear the plaintive creak of the leather ties that bound him to his agonizing lesson. She can still hear the groan of the wood as he twisted away from the descending scourge and a scream smothered behind tightly-closed lips. She can still hear the whines that slipped from his throat, the ragged pants when he was too tired to fight or scream. She can still remember the unsettling slackness of his body when unconsciousness took him and he simply hung in his bonds, blood dripping onto the stone floor.

And she can still remember the Father's impassive face as the lash rose and fell and Johannes' limp body jumped beneath each stripe. Blank as the stone of the seminary wall, as though he were threshing wheat in a sun-drenched field and not beating a young boy nearly to death in the name of a just and merciful God.

 _They tortured me because they could, and they made you watch. They tortured me because I dared to question, to think for myself, and then they denied me the simple comfort of my friend. They left me to lie on my cot with my cassock sticking to my ruined back, and then they rubbed salt in my wounds and told me to thank God for my good fortune. What kind of brothers would do such a thing?_ he demands.

 _The ones we had,_ she answers softly, and looks to the firmament above. It's dark now, and the moon and stars are in full splendor. Their light washes the world in pale silver, diaphanous as wedding lace, and she idly wonders what it would feel like on her fingertips. Like ice, perhaps, or like quicksilver, cold and viscous and tenacious as death.

_Even if you could forgive him for this wrath against the brothers who turned from him, how can you pardon the deaths of all those innocents? The settlers never wielded a lash against him, never took sordid pleasure in his humiliation, anguish, and isolation. They never deprived him of food or left him to starve in his own piss and called it repentance. They were simply living their lives, eking what joy they could from the stingy soil and the meager promise of tomorrow. They loved as you love, and yet he slaughtered them. Men, women, children. Even infants in their cribs. What reason could he have for that? What sin could they have committed?_

"I don't know," she whispers, and deepens the gouge the toe of her boot has carved in the sand at her feet. Try as she might, she cannot reconcile the architect of such brutal carnage with the man who curls protectively around her in his bed and murmurs endearments in her ears and eagerly escort her to breakfast every morning, his hand in hers as he draws her up the corridor to the kitchen, and who brings her cups of tea in the afternoon and mugs of warm milk drizzled with honey and dusted with cinnamon at dawn, when he nestles beneath the blankets with her and falls asleep in a tangle of limbs. She doesn't know how the man who looks at her with such hopeful adoration can pillage and burn and crush the skulls of helpless children. She's tried to explain it, to appease her prickling conscience with the thought that he cannot have killed them all, that maybe he was acting on instinct or driven by some primal sense of self-preservation, but she knows better. Perhaps he hadn't raised his hand against the children and the old women in the settlements and outposts overrun by the vampires, but he had stood aside while the evil was done, had let the innocent blood be shed. Perhaps he had even exulted in it.

_And God knows what he's doing now. He's left half a dozen times since you got here, slipping out on the witching hour and returning with the dawn, dust on the brim of his hat and the shoulders of his duster. He never tells you where he goes, or why, and the one time you volunteered to accompany him, the vehemence of his refusal unnerved you. He was all apologies and tender embraces once he realized he'd stung you, kisses at your temple and whispers against your cheek, but in the instant before he recovered himself, there was nothing of your cherished brother in his eyes, only unspoken warning not to press the issue. So you haven't. You're too much of a coward to sacrifice this newfound happiness to the unkind truth._

_He's always happy when he returns, content and overflowing with swagger and affection as he comes in with the first light of dawn and drops his hat upon the small table beside the door. If you're there when he enters, he sweeps you into a possessive embrace and twirls you across the floor, laughing as he caresses your face. If you're not, he searches you out, boots heavy upon the wooden floor, and bids you come to his room, where he sheds his duster and boots and black jeans and entices you beneath the covers with outstretched arms and a wordless entreaty. You always go, because you can deny him nothing, and because you refuse to deny yourself after all these years. You let him enfold you and draw his lips across your jaw and press kisses to his ear, and on his breath is a smell you could recognize if you chose, sweet and coppery, pennies and sour wine._

_It's the smell of corruption, the smell of death, and still your desire burns. Still you dream of his touch upon your most forbidden flesh, and in the night, you dream of his heat between your slick, needy thighs._

Yes, she wants him, needs him with a hunger that frightens her with its intensity. She has loved him since she was a child and desired him since blood first painted her gangly thighs and cramped her belly in a heavy, feverish fist. The Church had never discussed matters of the flesh except to denounce them as an unpardonable sin expressly forbidden to its children. They were never taught about sex or the heady pleasures to be found in another's touch, and yet, they had dreamed of it all the same. Khara had never known the touch of a man, and yet, she had coveted Priest for years, had dreamed of him as she had dreamed of Johannes. And though she has never known passion, never so much as rutted against her own fingers in the darkness of the barracks, she has longed to know Johannes as a wife knows a husband, to lie with him and offer him the yielding shelter of her body.

And he has desired her, has defied the Church and pressed himself against her back as they lay on sandy ground, has lost himself to urges too powerful to be thwarted by his terror of the Fathers and their terrible, flaying lash and rocked against her in his sleep, panting and moaning in her ear as his body found temporary relief from the torment of his heart. She has felt the primal surge of his hips and the frantic urgency of his straining cock through the fabric of his cassock, and she has heard him cry out as his release grips him and sends his seed into the fabric of his robes to stiffen in the wool like the Mark of Cain. She has never told him of this, never confessed her knowledge of his weakness. When it was happening, she had simply pretended to be asleep, mouth clamped shut against her own cries and fingers digging into the dry sand beside her bedroll to keep them from slipping between her legs, and in the years since, when she had thought him lost forever, she had drawn shameful comfort from the memories and imagined how different life might have been had she rolled over and slipped her hands under his robes.

 _There is no Church here,_ Johannes often tells her, and without its pervasive influence and constant disapproval, such thoughts have come to dominate her waking hours. She is surrounded by him--his touch, his scent, his voice in her ear and the familiar solidity of his body at her back--and with no Church to punish her for the yearning of her heart and the hunger of her body, she sees little reason to ignore them. Why should she? Her chastity has brought her neither peace nor strength, and her abstinence had not saved him. Her maidenhead had been intact when the vampires had dragged him into the darkness and out of her reach, and its presence had not eased the ache of his loss, had offered no virtuous consolation as she had languished in the barracks with her grief low and heavy in her belly like the child he had never planted there. Why should she hold true to a vow offered up in the innocence of childhood? She is no martyr, no great soldier of God. She is only human, and so very, very tired of this thirst that no prayer can slake.

 _How do you know he hasn't broken it already?_ Mariel now, sharp as the crack of wood on stone. _He's killed children, annihilated the towns and cities he once swore to protect, slaughtered his brothers and left them to rot on crosses in the middle of decimated settlements. What's to stop him from indulging in his disgusting, base pleasures between the writhing legs of one of the women he killed?_

 _He wouldn't do that,_ she counters, and studies the fabric of her cassock in the moonlight as it lay over her knees.

_Why not? You never would've believed he would attack helpless people, either, but he did. Snapped the necks of old women pleading for their lives and crushed the skulls of screaming infants under his bootheel. Maybe he lost his virginity between the thighs of some teenage girl while she drowned in her own blood. Who knows? Maybe he found his release by reaching between their bodies and opening her belly?_

_Stop, sister,_ she pleads, and closes her eyes against the flood of hideous images. _He wouldn't do that._

 _Why?_ she scoffs. _Because he loves you?_ It's almost a sneer. _Don't be naive, child. Lust has clouded your reason. His capacity to love died along with his humanity. If he wants you now, it is only because he wants to profane a child of the Church, to corrupt you with his filthy seed and in so doing insult the Church._

 _I am not just a vessel for the fucking Church,_ she howls, and shoots to her feet. _He is my brother, and you will not turn me from him. I left him once upon the word of the Church. I will not make the same mistake._

She turns and stalks into the house, throwing the door open so hard that it crashes against the arm of the couch and rebounds. Her sudden entrance startles the familiar, who is dusting the parlor. It yelps in surprise and whirls to face her, feather duster clutched to its chest.

"Are you all right, mistress," it asks timidly, and strokes a dust-coated feather. 

"Where is the kerosene lantern?" she barks.

It quails at her anger. "If it's not hanging from the nail on the lean-to, then it's in master's study. If it's not there, then I suppose he must've taken it. Though," it says, and its bald head retracts into the flabby wattle of its neck, an albino turtle retreating into its shell, "he certainly doesn't need it. Master has eyes like a hawk."

She ignores his prattle and strides down the corridor to the door adjacent to his bedroom. She raps on the closed door as a matter of courtesy, and then she twists the tarnished brass knob and slips inside the small, dark room. When Johannes is here, which is often, it is inviting and cozy, filled with the wavering, orange glow of candles and kerosene lanterns and the smells of dust and ink and old leather bindings. Whatever else the Queen's blood changed in him, it had not changed his love for books. The bookshelves on either wall are full of them, stuffed to overflowing, with volumes stuffed between the top of one shelf and the bottom of the next and piled beside the chair behind his simple wooden desk and the small chair in front of it in which she sometimes sits to watch him work.

This room is the essence of him, she thinks as she crosses to the desk and picks up the lantern, quiet and studious and full of shadows, and she wishes he were here to shuffle through the papers scattered over his desk and tap the toes of his boots against the hardwood as he nibbles the top of his pen and ponders weighty matters of salvation and eschatology, and to dispel the disquieting thoughts that trouble her mind with the low murmur of his voice. She sighs and leaves the room as she found it, and then she closes the door behind her.

The familiar hovers nearby, box of matches in hand. "For you, mistress," it says, and shuffles in a capering, avian dance of deference.

She scowls at it in bewildered disgust and snatches the matches from it. "Thank you," she says curtly, and shoulders past it before it can speak again.

"You're welcome," it calls after her, and she can hear the papery rasp of its palms as it wrings its hands behind her.

She rolls her eyes and carries the lantern out of the cabin and across the patch of sand that serves as the yard to the lean-to. It's home to pails and shovels, pickaxes and pitchforks, and a quartet of thick, iron chains dangle from the pair of wooden beams that prop up the sagging roof. Perhaps the former tenants had used them to dress cattle or the occasional jackal caught by a well-placed snare, but they remind her of the chains from which wayward acolytes had so often been suspended by unforgiving Fathers charged with meting out the Church's justice, and she shudders. She's surprised that Johannes would keep them. Surely his wrists and ankles must burn and throb at the sight of them, ugly memories drawn from the marrow of his bones like old infection. 

She carefully lights the lantern and adjusts the flame, and when it's as bright as she can make it, she hangs it upon a long, bent nail driven into the single post and settles herself in the center of the faint glow cast upon the sand. She crosses her legs and steeples her hands and presses her lips to her fingertips.

 _Bless me, O, Lord, for I am your child, born of sin and forgiven by Your grace._ She closes her eyes and wills her body to relax, the words to flow from her lips and over her fingers like holy oil. _All light and bounty flow from Thee, and all that I do is possible only through Your wisdom and mercy. I come to you burdened with the sin of a wicked heart and ask to be purified in Your name, that I might know peace and set my feet upon the path You have chosen for me._

Her breathing deepens, and her heartbeat slows. The constant, dull ache of her cracked rib recedes, and she's dimly aware of the injured tissue and bone knitting itself together.

_I beseech Thee, O, Lord, though I am unworthy, heal me, that I may do Your work._

_Liar,_ hisses Mariel. _The Lord's work is the last thing on your mind. You seek healing so you can despoil yourself with that abomination, ride the flesh between his legs and let him spill between your harlot's lips,_ she spits, and in her mind's eye, she sees a woman in an alley with her lover's cock in her mouth and her hand working furiously between her legs.

 _See! See,_ Mariel crows triumphantly. _Already he poisons you with his corruption._

She pushes the voice aside and tries to return to her devotions, but the lurid images crowd her mind and shatter her peace, and the steeple of her fingers shudders and buckles. She opens her eyes, and her heart thuds painfully against her ribcage.

"Stop," she pleads. "Father, give me peace."

 _Why should He hear the empty prayers of a weak-willed trollop so willing to sacrifice His favor for a few minutes of rutting in the filth like a dog?_ The woman in the alley returns, head bobbing in counterpoint to the man's ragged thrusts, and it's Johannes she sees, eyes slitted against the grotty, licentious pleasure and lips peeled back to reveal the delicate curve of fangs.

 _Shameless whore,_ Mariel says contemptuously. _That's what you'll be if you stay here. Just a vampire's whore, spreading your legs for a monster who delights in death and blood and perversion._ The image of the fornicating couple is replaced by Johannes between the splayed legs of a dead teenage girl, blood slathered on his chin and staining his teeth and eyes a diseased, yellow glow in the moonlight.

"Stop!" she shrieks, and claps her hands to her ears, in a paroxysm of panicked kinesthesia. "For God's sake, stop," she moans. "Why must you ruin everything?"

 _There is no Church here,_ Johannes always says, but he's wrong. It is here, steeped in her veins and imprinted on her skin and embedded inside her mind like a tumor. She will never be free of it. It will hound her until it kills her, and then she, too, will be forgotten, an unfortunate blight blotted from the record and left to the scouring, merciless caress of the desert sand.

She wraps her arms around herself and begins to cry, an exhausted keening that carries across the desert. It also attracts the notice of the familiar, who appears on the porch.

"Are you all right, mistress?" it calls fretfully into the night, and its fishbelly hands wring, wring, wring.

"Go away," she snarls, and lunges half-heartedly at it, but in truth, she has no strength to follow through on the implied threat.

The familiar recoils nonetheless, hands held up as though to ward off an unseen blow, and scuttles back into the cabin. When the door closes behind it, she buries her head in her hands and waits for Johannes to return.

 

While Liese waits for him in the glow of a kerosene lantern, Johannes stands in the vast expanse of the desert and brushes his teeth with a sachet of sage and cardamom. He takes special care to brush behind his molars and along the curve of his fangs, where a piece of his most recent meal is so stubbornly wedged. A stringer of larynx, he supposes, irksome as cold gristle. When the sachet fails to remove it, he huffs in annoyance and prods it with the blade of his tongue. It jiggles encouragingly but holds firm, and he swears under his breath and reaches for the canteen at his belt.

He should hardly be surprised, he supposes. The man of which it had once been a part had been equally tenacious, surprisingly spry in spite of his consumptive scrawniness and possessed of an animal cunning that had provided a welcome challenge after months of blubbering weaklings who huddled in their own piss and groveled at his feet. He'd certainly been better than the soft-bellied man he'd taken last week who had tried to save himself by offering him his daughter's cunt. He'd had no use for that, though he had taken her blood happily enough, but not before he'd cracked the cowardly bastard's chest and torn out his lungs and looped his quivering guts around his flaccid, piss-stained cock. It was the least he could do for a daughter betrayed by a spineless father. 

_Just like your parents betrayed you,_ murmurs the voice of bitter memory, and he sees a flash of his parents, closing the door in his tear-stained, beseeching face as the recruiter dragged him across the yard and away from the cool, soothing damp of the riverbank. Away from the lines he had helped his father set that morning. Away from the lush river grasses and the mud that sucked and seeped between his bare, sun-browned toes. Away from the sun and into the loveless, barren womb of the Church.

His parents are long gone, left to him now only in snatches of memory and in his mother's hair and his father's high cheekbones. And in his fastidious attention to hygiene. That he learned from his mother, who taught him to brush his teeth and wash behind his ears and his private places. He can still remember standing on a small footstool in front of the bathroom sink, toothpaste foaming on his lips and dripping from the bristles of his toothbrush.

 _That's right,_ his mother said from behind him, and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. _Gentlemen always have clean mouths. Besides, girls don't want to kiss boys with dirty mouths._

He'd been too small to understand that then, five years old and convinced all girls were of the devil, but he had wanted to please his mother, to be her good little Johannes, so he'd dutifully brushed until the toothpaste bubbled after every meal and spat flecks of plaque and grilled perch into the rust-stained basin.

No fish now, only stringy bits of screaming bandit, and when he spits, the saliva that bubbles on the sand is thick and pink. No mother now, either, just a blanched, stricken face in the crack of the door before it closed and locked forever against him and in the glass-paned window she washed every day, watching as the Church carried him away.

She never reached for him, he recalls now as he takes a sip of water and swirls it in his mouth. She had never cried out, never begged, never implored the Father to pass him over and let him remain her son. The only proof of her grief had been the dampness of her cheeks. She had let him go without a whimper, had simply stood beside his father and let the priest lead him from the house and into the yard, and when realization had come for him, and he'd begun to cry and struggle against the iron grip that held him, she had done nothing. She had simply stood there, blinking dumbly at his outstretched fingers, and when he had broken free and run for the door and the sanctuary of home, she'd shut the door in his face and turned the lock. He'd been so stunned by this betrayal that he could only weep, small fists battering the door until the Father had lifted him bodily and carried him away like a sack of grain, provisions for the holy larder.

He wonders what she would think of him now, the mother dearest who had sold her little Johannes in return for the blessing of the Church. What did she ask of them in return for her only child? A handful of worthless blessings and a votive candle set upon the altar of the High Cathedral? Perhaps it was his father who had set the price, who had traded him for a blessing upon his lines. God had once asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son just because He could. Why wouldn't he move another father's heart to sell the flesh of his flesh for a season's bounty from the river? 

They would hardly recognize him now, this man with ragged cuticles and hair in dire need of a trim and stubble on his cheeks and chin. The Church, too, would be appalled, though it should be noted that it was the Church who had taught him how to brush his teeth with a sachet of cardamom and sage and wash his stinking prick with the water from his canteen. While it preached cleanliness as an act of godliness and ordered its children to keep their bodies pure as a mark of devotion to Christ, the unsullied Lamb of God, it spared little thought to how this commandment was to be observed in the creeping sand and merciless heat of the desert, where they slept on bedrolls that grew stiff and rank with sweat and pissed and shit against rocks and buried it like animals. Supplies were limited to what they could carry, and that left little room for toothbrushes, nail clippers, mouthwash, or shaving cream. Or toilet paper, for that matter. The priestesses often had to ration their sanitary supplies or tear strips from the hem of their cassocks, and rumor had it that some priestesses brewed decoctions to stop the cycle altogether, lest the smell of blood attract vampires and other predators. No doubt the Church had promised his parents that his was to be a life of virtuous exaltation, but they had treated him little better than an animal and left him to scrounge in the dirt like a starving cur.

The Church and his faithless parents are irrelevant now, phantoms of the past and the equally-distant future. Now there is only Liese, who waits for him at home, sweet and clean and pure. It's for her that he stands here so assiduously scouring his teeth and waging war with a gobbet of sickly bandit. He doesn't want her to see him with blood on his chin and flecks of skin in his teeth and the stink of slaughter on his breath. He will not taint her with the ugly necessities of his life. He has no pity for the people he kills. They are simply sheep too slow to flee the snapping jaws of the wolf, and he will not regret his will to live. But Liese has always been sweeter, has always abhorred cruelty and death and cried out for the weak and downtrodden, and she would not understand, would weep for his prey as she had once wept for him. He doesn't want to hurt her, to see her anguish as he opens the throat of some mewling farmer, and so he will keep it from her as long as he can.

 _You're hardly so noble,_ sneers Priest. _You don't want her to see this because you're afraid she'll see you for the monster you are. It's easy to pretend you're the brother she loved when your face is clean and your hands are warm and gentle. It's not so easy when you're slathered in blood from nose to chin and snapping the arm of an eighty-year-old man who's shit his pants. Not so easy when you're hard as iron inside your pants because the death throes and the smell of hot blood is an aphrodisiac. I wonder if she'd still welcome your touch if she knew that after a kill, you sometimes fuck yourself next to the carnage you've wrought, too lost in your bloodlust to wait. I wonder if she'd part her legs for you if she knew that death brought you such pleasure, if she'd offer herself to such a depraved, godless creature._

He spits on the sand, but the damn remnant of bandit is still lodged between his canine and second bicuspid. He sighs and reluctantly scrapes between them with the nail of his index finger. He tastes blood and sweat. The chewy string of gristle relinquishes its hold at last, and he spits it out and rinses with another swirl of water. When he's sure there are no lingering traces, he takes a long swallow of water and uses the rest to wash the dried blood from beneath his fingernails.

 _Shut up,_ he snarls as he returns his empty canteen to his belt and resumes his trek homeward. _Liese doesn't think I'm a monster._

_Then why hasn't she even kissed you yet?_

_She's been injured,_ he counters uneasily. _Injured and underfed and exhausted. Our loving Fathers have worked her to skin and bones and nourished little more than her soul, and I'm not even sure about that. She's spent most of her time eating and sleeping, mustering the energy to heal._

 _And in all that time, she couldn't have kissed you once? How much energy does a simple kiss require? She hasn't done it because she disgust her. If she feels anything for you, it's pity and sorrow for the man you were. You rubbed yourself against her like a desperate, craven dog, and she showed nothing. No desire, no passion. She only lay there and waited for it to be over. She endured you, and when it was over and your shorts were full of seed, she simply went to sleep._

He flushes with shame even as lust tightens his belly. He'd wanted her so badly, wanted to touch her and taste her and feel her gentle hands on him, but he'd been afraid, too, dry-mouthed and uncertain. He's never known a woman, and the only knowledge of sex that he possesses had come from that brief, delirious glimpse through a whorehouse window, and from the predations of the vampires as they ravaged the outposts. There was nothing gentle in what the latter did, nothing precious or sacred. It was profane and ugly and jarring. He hadn't wanted that for her, hadn't wanted to see her face contorted in pain and terror, but he had wanted to sate the restless hunger between his legs and satisfy the longing he'd known since he first woke in the night to find his cock high and taut against his belly.

He'd acted on instinct, had let his body do what it would. He'd thought she would enjoy it; he'd sensed her excitement, had heard the rush of blood in her ears and felt the heat of her skin and smelled her arousal on the air. He'd thought she would turn to him and offer the kisses and caresses, the contact he craved, but she had only lain there while his body rocked against hers. He'd been confused and hurt, and when his release had come, he'd felt, not euphoria, but an aching loneliness, and he could only settle beside her and curl an arm around her and listen to her sleep while his seed dried on his shorts and stuck to his skin.

 _It's because you disgust her,_ his brother needles savagely.

 _No,_ he snarls. _She loves me._

_Then why won't she touch you?_

He plunges his hand into the pocket of his duster. Once upon a time, his fingers had sought the comfort of a rosary, but now they curl around a chunk of quartz he'd found in the sand. It's cool and clear as glass, and he means to polish it and present it to Liese as a gift, a token of his affection. It's not the silk and satin and gold he wants to lavish on her, nor is it the lush roses she so richly deserves, but with a bit of polish and patience, it can be made beautiful. In the right place, it can catch the sun and fill her room with diffuse golden light. It's not much, but it's better than the stale bread and watery coffee with which he'd tried so desperately to court her beneath the watchful eyes of the Church.

 _What makes you think she wants anything from you?_ His brother snorts derisively. _She doesn't even want you._

The cruel voice is relentless, and by the time he reaches the cabin, he's trembling with rage and confusion. He's so preoccupied with its malicious homily of loathing and rejection that he doesn't see her at first, sitting in the waning glow cast by the lantern hung from the nail in the lean-to. Her head is bowed, long, golden hair free of its plait and nearly sweeping the sand, and her rosary lies in her lap.

"Liese?" he says warily.

She raises her head, and her cheeks are wet. She picks listlessly at the fabric of her cassock as it sags between her crossed legs. "Brother." It's a strangled, miserable whisper.

He approaches slowly, his heart thudding inside his chest, and crouches in front of her, hands dangling between his knees. "What is it?" he asks softly. "Has someone hurt you?" He reaches out to caress her damp, tear-scalded cheek. "Was it the familiar?" he growls. "Has it forgotten itself?" He turns his gaze to the door of the cabin, and a muscle twitches in his jaw. If the puling creature has hurt her, he will tear out its rotting throat and feed it its own fetid entrails.

A watery snort. "No." She reaches up and tangles her fingers with his as they rest against her cheek. "It's the Church."

His brow furrows in confusion, and he turns to study her in the eerie, orange light. "The Church?" he repeats blankly. "I don't understand. I've told you, there is no Church here."

She smiles, and a mournful sound escapes her. "Yes, it is," she says sadly. "It's here." She taps her temple. "It's always here, and it tells me that what I want is a shameful sin." Her lips tremble, and fresh tears spill down her cheeks.

"And what do you want?" It emerges as a rasp. His mouth has gone dry as the sand beneath his feet.

She doesn't answer. Instead, she rises to her feet and sweeps the sand from her robes. The rosary swings from the ends of her fingers and rattles like the rolling of bones. He rises with her, and he's surprised when she turns and pulls the hat from his head and drops it. He's about to protest when she steps forward and presses her forehead to his, cross to cross.

"We stood like this once," she says. "Do you remember?" 

"Yes," he says. There's no strength in it, and he feels too light inside his skin. He enfolds her as he did then. She's so small and fragile in his arms, and he can feel her heart pounding against his chest.

"Did you love me then?" A whisper against his skin.

"Yes," he croaks, and drops his lips to her crown. "Yes, my Liese."

She looks at him, and her hands cup his face. It's so gentle, so reverent that he wants to weep. "Do you love me now?" She draws her thumbs over his cheekbones, and he shivers helplessly.

His own hands rise to cradle her face. "Always. You were my last thought and my first."

She studies him intently, her eyes searching his face. "My Johannes," she murmurs.

"Yes."

She rises on her toes and presses her lips to his, soft and hesitant, and for a moment, he forgets to breathe. His heart stutters inside his chest, and for one wild instant, he considers the possibility that he's dreaming, that he never left the hive. This is his death dream, conjured by his dying mind as the blood seeps from his wounds and the vampires squabble over his body as it twitches in its last, agonized throes. 

_Or maybe this is heaven,_ he thinks as his hands drift up to tangle in her hair. _Maybe there is a God, after all, and this is the eternity He has created for me._

Liese sighs against his mouth, and the tip of her tongue flicks his stunned lips. The sensation galvanizes him, and he growls low in his throat and nips her bottom lip. She gasps and opens for him, and then he's kissing her in earnest. He tastes toothpaste and honey and the peppery remnants of sawmill gravy, and the slide of her tongue against his is so exquisite that he whimpers.

 _My sweetest sister,_ he thinks, and his hand drifts to the delicate stem of her neck. The flesh is smooth and pale beneath his fingers, and her pulse flutters beneath his palm.

She arches to expose her throat, and he wastes no time in availing himself of her generosity. She moans softly as his lips skim the tender flesh, and the throaty purr goes straight to his cock.

"Sister," he groans, and presses himself against her. "My Liese." He fumbles blindly with the hem of her cassock and slips a hand beneath it to grope clumsily at her underclothes.

She gasps again, ragged and hungry, but her hand slips down to grip his wrist. "Not here, brother," she pants. "Not like animals in the dirt."

"No," he agrees, and lets his hand fall, but he can't resist another kiss, another nip of her lip before he reluctantly disentangles himself and leads her into the cabin, his hat forgotten on the sand and the lantern burning brightly on the pole.

He's nearly blind with need by the time he leads her across the parlor, and he nearly bowls over the familiar, which stands in the middle of the room, wringing its hands.

"Does master require-?" it begins.

"See that I am not disturbed," he barks without breaking stride, and leaves it in the dust. There is no thought of vampires now, no thought of the Queen or familiars or vengeance against the Church. There is only Liese and this chance to fulfill his most cherished dream.

He leads her into his bedroom and locks the door, and then he spins and pins her against the door. "Liese. "Liese, Liese, Liese." He captures lips plump and rosy with his kisses and delights in the warmth of her body as she breathes into him. He's acutely aware of her breasts against his chest, and he's tempted to tear away her cassock and expose them to his hands and his avid gaze, but he's determined to savor this, and so he contents himself with trailing his hands over her sides.

"I've dreamed of this," she confesses breathlessly when he breaks the kiss for want of air. "I have wanted you for so long." She nips at his chin, and her fingers pluck at the knot in his ascot.

He growls and rocks against her. "I have wanted you since we were children. When I committed the sin of Onan, it was you I desired." She shudders at his words, and the ascot flutters to the floor.

"My love," she croons, and runs her fingers through his hair, and the endearment, so long desired, turns his blood to flame.

"Say it again," he demands, and gathers the hem of her cassock in his hands in preparation to pull it off.

"My love. My love. My love," she says, and lifts her hips so that he can lift the fabric over her waist. 

She takes it from him and pulls it over her head, and suddenly, she's before him in nothing but the satin shift the familiar brought back on its most recent trip to town and the threadbare, grey undershorts issued by the Church. It's a startlingly incongruous juxtaposition, ashes dusted over a rose. She's beautiful in the light of the moon and the taper set upon the nighttable by the fastidious familiar. That her glory should be marred by something so ugly offends him, and his fingers itch to tear them off.

"My love," she says again, and caresses his face. "I have always loved you." Her lips on his, sweet as honeyed wine, and he closes his eyes to savor the taste of her.

 _She loves me,_ he exults, and opens to her questing tongue. _Once again, you show yourself a liar, brother._

Her hands on his face and his neck and fumbling with the tiny buttons of his shirt. Pushing the duster from his shoulders and tugging his shirt down his arms. Her palms, cool on his overheated chest.

"Touch me," he pleads, and his tongue darts out to moisten dry lips. "Please, Liese-"

"Ssshhh." She presses her finger to his lips. "You have to beg me for nothing." She guides him to the bed and eases him onto it, and then she straddles him. In the candlelight, he can see the outline of her nipples through the shift, and his cock pulses inside his jeans.

She presses lingering, open-mouthed kisses to his forehead, his cheeks, his lips. It's so good, so much after a lifetime of isolation and longing, and he arches and writhes. His skin burns everywhere she touches, and the cross on his forehead simmers like a brand. "More," he begs, and gasps when the silk of her hair grazes his nipple.

"That pleases you?"

"Yes," he groans. His cock throbs painfully, and his hand reaches down to palm it through the fabric.

Liese follows its descent, and her brow furrows in confusion. "Do you prefer your hand?"

"No! No, it's just-"

She kisses him and sucks his lip between her teeth. "If you need to find release, brother, it's all right."

The tender wistfulness in her voice temporarily distracts him from his exquisite arousal, and his descending hand changes course to cup the back of her head. "I would find my release with you. Inside you."

She sits back, a warrior astride her mount. He can feel the warmth of her cunt against his crotch, and his hips rise mindlessly to meet it.

"You would know me as a husband knows a wife?" she says softly.

"Yes," he answers, and his hips jerk in anticipation.

Her hands slide over his bare chest, and he revels at the contact. "Don't you want that?"

She leans down to mouth his throat. "Of course. But-" She stills, and the sudden tension unsettles him.

"But what?" He places his fingers beneath her chin and tilts her chin to meet his gaze.

She shrugs and turns her head as though embarrassed, "If we do this, we will no longer be brother and sister. No sister loves their brother as I love you. I don't want to lose you."

"Sister," he soothes. "Oh, sister. You will always be my sister. Nothing will change that. Not the Church, not God, not...this. I will be yours always. As your brother. And as your love, if that is what you want." He reaches out to caress her bare shoulder.

"Yes, she whispers, and the desire in it makes his jaw ache. "Yes, this is what I want," she muemurs against his throat, and sucks the flesh of his Adam's apple between her teeth.

He mewls helplessly and slides his fingers under the thin straps of her shift. She laves her tongue over the tingling flesh, and he grunts and slides the strap down her arm to expose one, high, rounded breast. He stares at it, mesmerized and desperate to feel it beneath his hand.

She follows his gaze. "Did you dream of this?" she asks, and her lips twitch in an impish smirk.

"Yes." An undignified squawk throttled by arousal.

She props herself on her elbows, and her hair spills over her shoulder in golden profusion. She's a goddess of rosy lips and pale skin and lovely blue eyes, and the ache she inspires is primeval and atavistic. "Sister," he groans, and lunges for her exposed flesh.

He mouths greedily at the hollow of her throat and the ridge of her collarbone and yanks impatiently at the irksome straps of her shift until they slide down her arms, and then he presses his lips to the swell of her breast and flicks his tongue along the yielding slope until he finds her nipple. She cries out at the greedy, suckling warmth of his mouth, and her fingers card through his hair.

"Oh, God," she manages, and presses shamelessly against his mouth. She's so sweet, and her nipple is a swollen nub against his rhythmically-flicking tongue. Her hips begin to rock in time with his ministrations, and even with the blunting fabric of his jeans between them, it's almost too much.

 _No,_ he thinks. _I want her to know pleasure first._

He reluctantly releases his greedy latch and eases her onto the bed beside him. She's flushed with arousal, and the sight of his saliva on her engorged nipple sends another surge of lust coursing through his veins.

"Have I-?" she begins, and then he battens onto her other nipple, and the question is lost in a wanton moan. "God, Johannes." She arches, hands curled into fists atop the sheets.

He grins around her nipple and cups her other breast in his palm. She arches into his touch, and her hips jerk when he rolls her nipple between his thumb and forefinger.

Tongue and teeth and kneading hands, and Liese sings for him. She splays and writhes at his every caress, and it's so much better than even his most audacious fantasy. Every nerve is alive, and his senses are in overdrive. He can smell her arousal, honey and sea salt, and hear the thunder of her heartbeat. Her flesh is ripe and yielding beneath his hands, and his own prickles as though a thousand old hurts have begun to mend at last.

"Please, love," she pleads as he scrapes her nipple with his teeth. "Please touch me."

"I am," he says innocently, and sucks her nipple into his mouth.

"Please." She looks at him with heavy-lidded, glassy eyes, and her legs part in wordless entreaty.

He splays his palm against her belly for a moment, and then he slides his long fingers over the flimsy fabric of her undershorts. She rises to meet him, and God, the heat is incredible. He can feel the dampness of her arousal through the thin cotton, and he gives the sensitive cleft an experimental stroke.

Her mouth opens in a soundless cry. He can only stare in stupefaction at her pumping hips and upthrust breasts, and only the discipline handed down to him by the Church stops him from coming in his pants.

 _I'm sure the good monsignor would be glad to know his teachings are being put to good use,_ notes a dry, prim voice inside his head, and he chuckles in unrepentant delight.

He bunches her undershorts in his hand and tears them away, and there are no more secrets between them, She is bared to him in all her splendor, and he gazes at her in awe, a believer offered a fleeting glimpse of his goddess. He takes in her heaving, upthrust breasts, swollen and slick with his fervid attention, and the flat, creamy plane of her stomach. Her slender hips, and between the juncture of her parted thighs, her sex.

He reaches out to stroke the coarse thatch of blond curls, transfixed by the reality of it beneath his hand. This is what the Fathers were so eager to keep from him, the forbidden fruit they had foresworn him to taste.

 _The Fathers told us that man was brought to sin by forbidden fruit,_ he thinks distantly as his fingers slide into that delicious, slick heat and Liese speaks in the unknowable language of God, the sacred language of creation and eternal hosanna. _But they lied. If man fell from grace, it was for this. And I would gladly join them._

He withdraws his fingers and studies them in the candlelight. Wet and viscous, and when he brings them to his lips, they taste of ambrosia. He groans and licks them clean, and Liese moans beside him.

"Let me see you," she pleads, her eyes fixed on his mouth and the swirl of his tongue around his fingers.

"Mmm?" Logy, and then understanding dawns. He gets up and kicks off his boots, and then he unzips his jeans and pushes them and his boxers down. His cock springs free with a jaunty bob and rises flush to his belly. He steps out of the puddled tangle of clothes and stands bare to her scrutiny. He fights the adolescent urge to shuffle his feet and cover himself. He swallows, terrified that she will find him wanting.

She swallows with a dry click, and her heartbeat accelerates as she takes him in. "You're beautiful," she says reverently, and holds out her arms.

"My Liese," he murmurs and climbs back into bed. He strokes her cheek with his hand and rolls her on top of him. "On your hands and knees," he commands. She blinks at him in befuddlement, but she obeys, and he slides his hand between her legs and stirs his fingers over her clit in a languid circle.

Her eyes widen and roll in their sockets, and she bucks against him. "Yes," she says, thin and wavering, and the surprise in her expression startles him.

"Haven't you ever touched yourself?" He taps the swollen nub with his fingers and is rewarded with another bewildered cry and needy thrust of her hips.

She shakes her head, her hips rocking against his hand. "I wanted to, but...it was a sin." 

He can't help it. He laughs. _My sweet, obedient sister._ Then, _I am truly her first. Her first love. Her first pleasure._ It's an aphrodisiac, and his hips churn in lewd sympathy. "I love you, Liese. There is no Church here, and this is no sin." He stiffens his fingers and increases the pressure on her sensitive flesh, and Liese all but wails, elbows digging into the mattress as she ruts against his hand.

"My brother, my love, oh, oh, oh." It's music, the song of the celestial host, and he loses himself to it as he watches the bob and sway of her breasts and the enticing sheen of sweat on her skin.

"My beautiful Liese," he murmurs, and it's all he can do not to take himself in hand as she rides toward completion. He recognizes its approach in the shortening of her thrusts and her failing rhythm. "My glory," he says, and pinches her clit between his fingers.

She stills so completely that he's afraid he's ruined it, but then she throws back her head and howls, legs splaying and body jerking and shuddering spasmodically and mouth stretched impossibly wide.

He's prepared neither for the force of it or the duration, and when she finally collapses against him, he can only stroke her sweat-dampened hair. She gasps and shudders, a limp, yielding weight atop him, and he rubs her back with a soothing hand.

"Sssh. It's all right," he assures her when she mewls. "Are you all right?"

She nods, and her hand snakes up to stroke his chest. "They lied to us."

 _Of course they did._ "About what?"

"There is no sin in this. Only grace. I felt it. When I was...I thought I could fly, could reach out and touch His face."

"They're all liars, my Liese." He smooths the hair from her face, and his cock twitches restlessly between his legs. The need for release is an exquisite anguish. "Forgive me, sweetheart, but I need..." He shifts beneath her, and it grazes her belly.

She stirs. "I'm sorry, love. I didn't mean to be so selfish." She raises her head and kisses his chin. "What do you need me to do? I've never-" She shrugs.

"On your knees again."

She dutifully rises to her knees, and he carefully positions himself between her legs. "I don't know where it is," he admits. "You'll have to guide me."

She reaches out and curls a tentative hand around him, and he jerks in her gentle grasp. 

"Will it hurt?" she asks.

"It might," he admits. "The first time. But I won't hurt you any more than it demands. I promise."

"Have you ever-?"

"No. I've never wanted anyone but you." He strokes her face and trails his hand down her throat and over her breasts. "Whenever you're ready."

She gives his cock a long stroke, and then she slowly guides it between her folds. She hitches a breath and inches forward, and then he's inside her. The wet, sucking heat is intoxicating, and he surges upward. There's an odd, elastic resistance to his advance, and then it dissolves and he's buried deep within his precious Liese.

Liese utters a sharp, pained cry, and her body stiffens at the intrusion. She leans down and buries her face in his shoulder.

"Sweetheart?" he murmurs, disturbed by her sudden stillness even as his hips rise and fall and plunge his aching cock into that glorious, sucking friction.

"It hurt," she whimpers, and the note of betrayal in it tempers his arousal. 

"I'm sorry, Liese," he says, and brushes the hair from her face to press open-mouthed kisses to the side of her throat. "Forgive me, my sister. It wasn't my intent."

"The penance of Eve," she mumbles. 

"It's over now. It won't hurt like that again." He coaxes her onto her elbows so that he can reach her breasts. "Concentrate on this," he urges, and mouths her sternum as his hands cup her. "That's right," he encourages as she moans softly.

He can smell it now, salt and copper and iron. Blood. He glances down at the join of their bodies and sees a smear of crimson on his pistoning cock and her pale thighs. He groans and increases his pace. Liese whimpers again, but he can't stop. It's too good, and he's waited too long.

 _I love you,_ he thinks. _I love you so much._ He suckles her and caresses her from nape to the swell of her ass in an effort to offer some comfort as his body betrays his best intentions and batters her in a mindless frenzy.

"Liese, look at me," he pleads, and cups her face in his hands. She's pallid and silent, lips parted, and she utters a breathless squeak with each upward surge of his hips.

He forces himself to slow despite the protests of his cock. He won't take his pleasure from her pain. "Do you want me to stop?"

She blinks at him as though emerging from a dream. "No. "Just...lie still a moment."

He stills with an effort. She shifts, and he's sure she's going to dismount him, but she doesn't. Instead, she begins to thrust, a slow, languid roll of her hips that pulls a moan from the pit of his stomach. He reaches out to steady her hips, and he sees the blood again. It's startling against the alabaster of her thighs, and guilt churns in his gut.

She rises and falls again, a wave lapping at the shoreline, and then she reaches between her legs and swipes her fingers through the blood. Her hips rise, and she studies it on her fingers. They fall, and she holds out her hand.

"This is my blood. Drink this in remembrance of me," she says solemnly, and her hips rise and fall, rise and fall.

It's blasphemy, filthy and sordid, and he loves it. He stretches to accept her offering and laps it from her fingers. Liese lets her head loll and moans, and there is no pain in it now, only throaty ecstasy.

"Yes," he hisses, and slurps her finger into his mouth.

She offers him more and more, and he gluts himself on her. She's sweeter than any Communion wine, and each taste only sharpens his desire. Tension coils behind his balls, and he knows it won't be long. He will find his release at last in the inviting warmth of his Liese, snatch this victory from the Church so determined to deprive him of all happiness.

"Ride me," she urges, and tightens around him, and he grips her hips with both hands and drives into her, lips peeled back from his teeth in a feral snarl. "God, Johannes." It's ragged and strangled, clotted with inexpressible pleasure, and he grunts as he watches her breasts bob and her sweat-slick belly tighten with the promise of another climax.

He catches a glint of silver between her breasts, and as his eyes focus, he realizes it's a small, silver cross. 

_Good,_ he thinks savagely as she tightens inexorably around his cock and his balls draw up. _You should be here to see me rob you of Your precious instrument, to watch her cast aside the chains You forced upon her when she was only a child._

He curls his fingers around the chain and raises his head to claim a bouncing nipple. "There's no Church here, Liese. Come for me. Love me." He swirls his tongue around a knurled peak and sucks it into his mouth, and Liese comes, her cunt fluttering and pulsing around him.

He comes with a shout, and as he bucks blindly into her, mouth open and eyes screwed shut against the waves of ecstasy that turn him inside out and tear the breath from his lungs, he rips the chain from her neck and lets it drop between their bodies, where it mingles with blood and seed.

"Mine," he says as she stills, and mouths her breasts in drowsy satisfaction. "Mine."

"Yours," she agrees, and collapses as he slips from her, flaccid and slick with blood and seed and her sated desire. 

He guides her onto the mattress and laps the salt from the hollow of her throat. The sheets are rumpled and soiled with sweat and seed and blood. He should change them, but he's spent, and Liese, too, is fading. She can scarcely keep her eyes open as he settles beside her.

"Mine," he says as her eyelids droop.

"Always," she answers sleepily, and then she's gone, lost to deep slumber.

"Always, he agrees, and sweeps the crucifix to the floor, where it's lost to the folds of his jacket. He curls around her, cock still twitching with the aftershocks of his passion, and revels in the scent of sweat and sex and love so joyously consummated.

 _Mine._ It's a cry of defiance hurled to the heavens, and his lips curl into a triumphant smile as he watches Liese sleep, naked and lovely in the pale dawn light.

He falls asleep with his hand on one bare breast, her puckered nipple peaked beneath the possessive cup of his palm.


	7. Sacred Covenants and Bitter Duties

He comes to awareness by slow degrees. Sheets tangled around his legs. The softness of a mattress beneath his hip. The last fading warmth of the sun on his bare flesh. Soft hair tickling his nose, and even softer flesh beneath his hand.

Memories return with his wakefulness. Liese beneath his hands, naked and splayed and wanting. Her cries in his ears and against his skin. Her kisses, numberless and sweet as wine and full of insatiable hunger. Her hair, golden fire in the candlelight as they moved together. And the greedy heat of her cunt around his cock, velvet and honeyed silk.

He purrs at this last, and behind his eyelids, he sees her as she rides him, nipples plump and peaked with desire and hips rocking in time to his eager thrusts. It's sublime, Heaven's veil but briefly parted, and his cock stirs beneath the sheets. He opens his eyes with an effort and sees Liese sprawled bonelessly beneath his arm, chest rising and falling with her slow and easy breathing.

_I knew you,_ he thinks wonderingly, and squirms to press himself against the spar of her hip. Flesh to flesh, and it feels so good after a lifetime of abstinence and denial. He brushes her hair from her neck and mouths the sensitive skin. It tastes of salt and sweat, but he doesn't care because it also tastes of her.

She moans and shifts beneath the bedclothes. "Wha're you doin?" she slurs, and rubs her eyes with the heel of her palm.

"My Liese," he murmurs happily, and nibbles on the side of her throat and along the delicate line of her jaw.

She grins sleepily. "You don't want to do that," she says. "I stink."

"I don't care," he murmurs against the side of her mouth. "I have waited so long for you."

"You will care when you get a mouthful of my morning bre-," she warns, but he stops her with a lingering kiss, breathes against her dry lips until she opens for him, and she sighs at the possessive slither of his tongue.

Her hand rises to cup the back of his skull, and he closes his eyes to revel in the contact. He nips at her bottom lip and shudders as she moans into his mouth. The hand cupping her breast gives a gentle squeeze, and her nipple peaks against his palm.

"Touch me, Liese," he whispers, and gives it a lazy tug.

She gasps and arches, and her hands glide over his shoulders and down his spine, palms flattened to maximize contact. He rises to meet it, muscles rippling beneath his skin, and his pores open, sand reaching for the kiss of desert rain. He sighs when her hands settle at the base of his spine and her nimble fingers trace idle patterns there.

He dips his head to kiss her again. "I love you." His nerves simmer with need, but it's lazy and remote. He has hours. Days. All the time in the world, and he intends to take it. He wants to explore, to map every inch of her with his hands and mouth and catalogue every twitch and cry and mewling whimper. He wants to unthread her with his eager, industrious fingers and put her together again, to see her undone and blind with want and hear her sending his name to God with every surge of her hips.

"And I love you." She trails her fingernails over his forearm. "But you really don't want to do this. "I'm still sticky from last night."

He grins and tweaks her nipple again. "That's easily remedied." He snatches another unhurried kiss from her pliant lips and reluctantly peels himself from her to get up. The sudden coolness against his skin prompts ripples of gooseflesh over his belly and balls, and when he glances down, he sees faint traces of blood and dried seed on his half-hard cock. He grimaces in distaste and pads to the dresser, where he retrieves a washbasin and a cloth.

He carries them to the bed and kneels beside it, and then he pulls back the covers to expose her nakedness in all its glory. "One of God's wonders," he marvels, and presses a kiss to her hip. Then he sits back and dips the cloth in the water. He wrings it out and presses it to her temple, and her eyelids flutter at its damp caress. "Mmm."

_Oh, I've only just begun._

Down her cheek and along her jaw and over her parched lips. Across the bridge of her nose and her upper lip and down her chin. Into the crease of her neck and the hollow of her throat, each movement and line an act of worship, an unwitting station of the cross drawn upon her flesh. Over the ridges of her collarbones and along the swell of her breasts, and Liese, she who has never feared him and always held his heart in the palm of her hand, submits without hesitation. Absolute faith, and it stirs him as much as the sight of her breasts and cunt.

He dips the cloth again and runs it down her arm and watches her pale flesh ripple. Her palm splays against the bedsheet. He rises to his knees and kisses her damp shoulder.

"What happens now?" she murmurs.

"What do you mean?" He washes each finger with persnickety care.

"With us? I became apostate the moment we loved. I can never go home again."

He freezes, cloth poised above the back of her palm. "Do you regret it?" His heart pounds inside his chest, and his contentment threatens to shatter like candyglass and embed within his flesh like shrapnel.

She reaches out to caress his cheek. "Never, Johannes. Whatever remains to me of this life, I will never regret it." She smooths his cheek with the ball of her thumb. "I just don't know what to do now."

He turns into her caress and kisses her palm. "You will have a long life, Liese, as long as you desire," he promises. _And I will love you for all of it._ "As for what you want to do with it, that's up to you." He resumes his patient work with the cloth. "Surely you must've thought about it for all those years. God knows I did."

"Oh? And what bright futures did you plan while we were squatting behind rocks and picking sand from our bread?" Her eyes are bright with fond amusement, and she strokes his temple and brushes strands of hair behind his ear.

"This," he confesses, and dabs the cloth along her ribcage. "Well, not exactly this," he amends. "I never planned on being taken by the vampires."

She smiles and cards her fingers through her hair. "Providence moves in mysterious ways."

"I suppose it does," he agrees, though he cannot share her sense of whimsy. He recalls too well the needling burn of fangs buried deep within his helpless, dying flesh. "But I dreamed of a life with you. A house. A life of quiet industry." He hesitates. "Children."

Her fingers dance over the nautilus of his ear. "A boy with your eyes and lovely, high cheeks," she says absently.

"A girl with your golden hair," he adds, and his heart flutters inside his chest, buoyed by a burgeoning hope. The cloth slides over the spar of her hip, and she sighs at the cool dampness. "Do you still?" he asks. His throat is dry, and his hand trembles as he washes her outer thigh.

"Dream of a life with you? Of course."

"Dream of children."

Dreamy eyes sharpen, and she studies him as she lies sprawled among the pillows, slender arm draped over her forehead. "I would like nothing better than to live such a dream," she answers. "The Church would never sanction a union between us. I had always thought to be a wife before I became a mother." She offers a rueful smile.

"Church be damned," he spits, and his vehemence startles her. Her leg flinches beneath his assiduous ministrations. "We are free of the Church. Why should we let it dictate the course of our lives and cower beneath its shadow?"

"Our children would be bastards," she points out. "They would be hounded by the Church and townspeople alike."

"Our children would be ours! Blood of our blood and flesh of our flesh and far more sacred to me than the empty words I once served. And as for those who would dare harm them..." His face contorts in a contemptuous grimace. "I would bathe the world in their worthless blood." The cloth trembles in his white-knuckled grasp.

Liese says nothing. Instead, she grips his chin and cups it in her palm. He meets her gaze, torn between shame at his naked need and unrepentant defiance. All that he has ever desired rests in the cup of her palm, and she can destroy it with a single syllable of refusal. His hand tightens around the towel, and his vision is so acute that he can see miniscule capillaries in her lips.

She releases his chin, and her fingers slide down his throat to rest on his bobbing Adam's apple. "Then we will have children, husband," she says, and her pale, cool hand finds the broad, muscled plane of his chest. "As many as God and your seed will." Languid fingers seek out his nipple and give it an indolent flick.

The sensation goes straight to his cock, and he bites back a groan. "You take me as your husband?" he manages, disbelieving and throttled with arousal and elation.

"I do. Do you not wish me as your wife?" she asks, but the answer is already in her eyes, sly and triumphant.

He lets go of the towel and surges forward to kiss her. "I do," he murmurs against her lips, and cradles her face in his hands. A flick of tongue and a sigh, and he's half on the bed, breathing into her while she presses up and into his hands. "I will make you my bride, give you a wedding," he promises, and she accepts his words like a sacrament.

She laughs against his lips. "How?"

He grins at her, giddy. "We are priests," he drawls, and dips his head to place reverent, open-mouthed kisses to the hollow of her throat. "We can conduct the rite ourselves. We don't need a blessing from a Church that serves only itself."

"You speak heresy," she warns, but there is no censure, only love.

"We need only the will." He flicks his tongue against her pulsepoint, and she arches beneath him, mouth open and eyes half-lidded and dark with growing desire.

"I will take you," she murmurs into the tousle of his hair. 

He looks up at her. "And I you." His heart is hot and swollen inside his chest, matched only by his cock, which juts defiantly from between his legs. He rubs himself against the side of the mattress and hums in satisfaction against her throat.

"It's hardly fair that you get to have all the fun," she pouts. She scoots over and pats the bed. "Come here." 

He obliges posthaste. She rolls onto her side, propped on her elbow, and reaches out to stroke him from shoulder to elbow. "I spent so much time wondering what you looked like under your robes."

"And do you like what you found?"

Her reply is a kiss, hot and thorough and dizzying. He moans into her mouth and moves to roll atop her, but she stays him with a hand on his shoulder and pushes him onto his back. "My turn," she purrs, and begins the work of undoing him.

Soft lips on his chin and a hot tongue on his throat. The scrape of teeth on his sternum and a benediction whispered to the sparse hairs there. "My husband, he who lights the dark," she murmurs, and his cock stiffens further.

_Husband, husband, husband._ The title burns beneath her lips like phosphorous against his goose-pimpled flesh, and he plunges his hands into the luxuriant fall of her hair, golden silk in his fingers.

"Liese." Breathless and strengthless and raw, and his throat is so constricted that he can scarcely draw breath. _She wants me. She loves me,_ he realizes. _She would take me to husband here in this bed._

Kisses light and tender. "My husband, staunchest shepherd of my heart." Delicate hands settle beneath his ribcage as though to steady him, and then the wet heat of her tongue envelops his nipple.

"Nnngh," he grunts, and wills his hands not to smash her face into his breastbone. It's so good, a heady, delirious ecstasy, and he writhes as the blood pounds in his cock in time with her swirling, flicking tongue and suckling lips.

"My husband, he who bears my burdens as his own." A paean sung into his flesh as she moves to his other nipple. Her hands stroke his belly, which tightens at her gentle touch.

_I could almost believe in His grace,_ he thinks as he watches her worship his flesh with her hands and lips. She makes no move toward his straining prick as it weeps precome down its aching length, but he doesn't care. This is an ecstasy unto itself, the stuff of feverish, slick-fisted fantasies. His Liese, lavishing him with more tenderness than he has ever known. Flesh that has known only welts and bruises gone to the bone tingles with the simple pleasure of contact and the headier promise of more. He had dreamed of this on the blood-soaked altar of his ugly rebirth, retreated to its illusory comfort as the life drained from his body and darkness clouded his vision. His Liese, loving him to the last, and now it is his glorious reality.

_Thank you, Mother, for your blessings upon me, your humble servant,_ he thinks, and gasps at the eagerness of her mouth as it tugs on his swollen nipple. His hips rise from the mattress in a helpless roll, and he strokes the back of her head.

"My husband, my shield and my keep." Her tongue carves an avid path from sternum to the cusp of his navel, and he moans as she covers it with soft kisses and the harsh scrape of teeth.

It's too much, but he never wants it to stop. There is no pain, no fear, no punishment for the needs of a body endowed to him by a sadistic Creator who promptly forbad him to satisfy them. There is only now, this breathless, delirious timelessness. There is only Liese, her touch, her smell, her unending love. His hand cards through her hair and settles at the base of her neck. So, soft and smooth, delicate as the skin of a peach beneath his fingers.

"My husband, he who nurtures my dreams as his own." Murmured into the shallow hollow of his navel and followed by the flick of her tongue.

"Yes," he croaks. Her teeth sink into the flesh just below his navel, possessive and unapologetic, and his hips buck at the nettling sting.

Her head descends still further, and his hand shoots out to stay her. "No. It's-I'm not clean." He fumbles along the edge of the bed until his fingers find the gelid wad of the cloth bunched under his ass. He rolls a hip and yanks it free and holds it out to her.

She takes it and presses a kiss to the pale strip of flesh above his pubic hair, and then she wraps it around him. The damp, coarse fabric is a torment to his hypersensitive flesh, and he cries out and thrusts mindlessly into the clammy dampness.

"So beautiful," she whispers, eyes fixed on his cock as it rises and falls between the loose folds of cotton.

He feels beautiful, priceless and treasured as she watches him pleasure himself, blue eyes wide and avid and lips parted. She pants with every upward surge of his hips, and her tongue darts out to moisten her lips. It's lewd and wanton, and he lets his head fall back onto the pillow and splays to offer her a better view and greater access. The cloth grazes his balls, and he snarls mindlessly, hands curling into fists, nails digging into the sheets and the skin of Liese's back. She hisses at the sudden sting but doesn't pull away, and lust wraps a leaden hand around his belly.

"My wife, she who lights the dark," he says, low and dark as smoke, and Liese's breath hitches in surprise. Her grip on the cloth falters, and though his prick protests the abrupt loss of friction, he reaches down and plucks it from her grasp and pulls her to him. "My wife, staunchest shepherd of my heart," he whispers against her cheek, and kisses her.

She sighs into his mouth. It's almost a sob, incredulous and exultant. She tastes of him, and he shivers as her tongue meets his. Her hand, divested of its helpmeet cloth, descends to encircle him again. "My husband, he who holds my heart in the palm of his hand," she murmurs. "Show me."

He smiles and mouths her throat until it's bared to him, and then he covers her hand with his and entangles their fingers. "Like this," he says, and begins to stroke. She drops her gaze to between his thighs, where he rocks slowly and steadily between their fingers. She studies intently, ever the student, and he chuckles at the desire and curiosity that burn in her eyes. "This is what I did for all those years," he murmurs, and hisses as her palm slides over his slick head. "When I couldn't suppress my desire for you any longer, I took myself in hand and spilled my sin to the earth. In the shower. On the burning desert sand."

She moans at the visual he presents, and he grins. 

"What did you think of?" she asks unsteadily.

"You." He flicks the blade of his tongue against the shell of her ear and gives her wrist a gentle, guiding twist as her hand glides over the head of his cock. "Your hands." He squeezes her fingers. "Your lips." He slips the blade of his tongue behind her upper lip for a brief instant. "Your cunt."

She starts at the obscenity, but her breathing quickens, and her nipples stiffen. "What could you have imagined, husband?" she asks, and God that word makes his blood burn and his cock ache. "We were never instructed in such things.

"No," he agrees as his hips snap greedily into a grip grown more confident by the moment. "But when I was an acolyte, I-saw a couple in a brothel window." He groans at the memory, and increases his tempo. "He was fucking her from behind like a dog in rut, and I-" He moans and swivels his hips as he rises. "I imagined it was us," he finishes.

Liese keens. She's panting heavily now, eyes wide and glazed, and her nipples are swollen peaks. He's surprised when she releases her hold, and he whines in disappointment. "I saw something, too," she croaks. "When I was seventeen. I saw a couple in an alley, and the woman...she was on her knees with her hand between her legs and her mouth-" She swallows with a dry click and squirms atop the sheets. "-her mouth on his cock. They looked so blissful, and I wanted it to be us."

A penny drops in his mind. "Is that why the Fathers punished you?" Liese's pale spine arching beneath the lash. The tantalizing sway of her breasts.

She nods. "I didn't mean to see, but once I did, it was all I could see."

He wonders if she took refuge in her sordid daydream as the unsmiling father rained Divine justice upon her captive flesh, if she drew comfort from the thought of sucking his cock while the lash cracked and her tortured skin reddened and split and wept. He wonders if she were wet. The thought nearly sends him over the edge, untouched.

"So why didn't you?" he asks, and nuzzles her jaw.

"Because it was a sin, and I was afraid that if I gave in to it, my impurity would damn us all." She curls her fingers around him again and gives a slow tug. Still timid, but learning quickly.

_He took you from me because I loved you, because I wanted-_

He growls and kisses her until she arches into his touch and moans into his mouth, and when they part, breathless and yearning, he says, "You were never impure. You were the best of God's grace, the brightest of His lights. You were a goddess among undeserving maggots." He cups her throat to feel her pulse flutter against his palm.

"Why didn't you? If you wanted me?"

"Because I was a fool," he admits. "I wanted to be a man of honor and keep to my vows." He moans as her palm slides over his foreskin with inexorable friction. "I wanted you to be proud of me. And because I was afraid."

Her brow furrows in confusion. "Of what?"

"That you did not feel the same."

"Husband, how could you ever doubt?" she says, stricken.

"Because I was a fool," he reminds her.

She smiles. "No more doubt," she says, and draws him into a greedy kiss. Her hand squeezes the base of his cock, and he rises helplessly into her grasp.

"My husband, he in whom I find my strength," she intones, and slithers down to mouth his navel and press her nose into the thatch of coarse hair above his cock.

"What are you-?" he begins, but then she flicks her tongue against the base of his cock and the words are lost in a strangled bleat.

"My husband, he to whom I bind my heart and body," she murmurs against his length, and the vibrations tease more precome from its swollen, glistening head.

"Liese, my wife." It's a guttural sob, and he thrashes in a blind, feverish ecstasy, hips rutting helplessly in search of friction and heat.

Gentle hands pin them to the bed. "My husband, he to whom I offer my womb." She licks him from base to tip, and he howls, legs spread and back bowed and hands fisted in the sheets. Another, and another, and his chest tightens. He can manage only whimpers and growls and reedy gasps, and he's sure his heart is going to explode from his chest in a gout of blood and a rush of seed spurted over his belly. 

"Fuck," he hisses. "Don't," he begs. "Wife, don't stop."

"Husband, he whom I love more than myself. This pledge I make to you, bound by flesh and witnessed by the Almighty, that I will know no other for all of my days. Wherever you go, I will follow, even unto the ends of the earth, and when the end comes, I shall meet it with you, even it it mean my damnation." And then she bows her head and takes him into her mouth.

The Church fathers had spent a lifetime inculcating him with messages of grace and salvation and eternal glory and steeping those messages into his flesh and bones with cuts and bruises and liberal applications of the lash. He had never believed them, had thought them liars and cruel charlatans even as a boy. As a man, he had thought God's grace but a fairy tale, a sop with which to numb the smart and throb of his innumerable hurts and humiliations, but now, lying helpless beneath Liese's inexpert yet eager mouth, wet and sloppy and all-consuming, he finds at last a glimmer of its measure, a fleck of silica in a handful of sand.

_They lied to us,_ Liese says as he thrusts into the wet velvet of her mouth, past teeth and tongue and hollowed cheeks, and as her tongue swirls over the head of his cock and his climax gathers in the pit of his belly, he almost believes he can see the face of God, believes that if he stretched forth his hand, he could turn His face and force Him to look upon the child whose cries He would not hear.

Liese moans with every thrust, and the silk of her hair brushes his belly, a cool contrast to the heat of her enveloping mouth. Lust and fulfillment have made her beautiful, radiant and rosy with desire, and pride mingles with the atavistic desire that propels him into her willing mouth.

_Mine. My Liese. My wife._

One of her hands snakes up to entwine with his, as tender as her lips are wanton. It's so vulnerable that his chest aches. 

"My wife, my shield and my keep," he says softly, and brings her hand to his lips.

A muffled cry, and then her tongue surrounds his swollen head. The world goes white at the edges as his climax drives the air from his lungs and his ass thumps arrhythmically against the bed. "Liese, Liese, Liese," he chants as his cock spasms and twitches into the greedy latch of her mouth. "My wife, my-m-my-" The power of speech forsakes him, and he can only writhe and rut and scrabble mindlessly in the sheets.

His cock is still twitching feebly when it slides from her mouth with a wet _plip_ , and when he musters the wherewithal and strength to raise his head from the pillow, he sees that she lies with her head resting on his thigh. Her tongue darts out to lick her lips, and she grimaces.

He reaches for her and pulls her up to tuck her head against his shoulder. "Did I hurt you?"

"No, love," she assures him. "It was just bitterer than I expected."

"Oh." He flushes, embarrassed. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It was worth it to see your face and know that I could bring you such pleasure. I would do it again a thousand times."

He kisses the corner of her mouth and tastes salt and iron. "That was only a thimbleful of the pleasure you bring me. Your smile does the same."

"I doubt that."

"It does," he insists, and taps his chest. "Here." He slides his shoulder from beneath her head and slides off the bed.

"What are you doing?" Perplexed.

"I haven't finished my vows," he says simply, and offers her a wolfish grin. He picks up the cloth and dips it into the bowl of water by his knee. "My wife, she who nurtures my dreams as her own," he says, and draws a cross over her breasts, lingering on the sensitive, puckered nipples. He teases them with the textured cotton and delights in her breathy whines.

He sets the sodden cloth on her belly and leans down to suckle her. She writhes beneath him, pushes insistently into his mouth, and her hands cup his head.

"Do you desire me, wife?" He circles her plump areola with his tongue and revels in the shameless jerk of her hips.

"Yes," she pants, and swallows.

He grins and picks up the cloth. He holds it over her open mouth and squeezes a few drops onto her tongue. "Wouldn't want you getting thirsty," he explains. He means it as sly insouciance, but her eyes flicker with gratitude.

He wets the cloth again and repeats the sweet torment of her breasts. Cool cloth and hot tongue, and it isn't long before she's thrusting impotently against the air, legs spread and cunt slick with frustrated arousal. It makes his mouth water, and his prick stirs with renewed interest.

The cloth glides over her belly. "My wife, she in whom I find my strength." He bends to kiss her stomach and slides the cloth to her inner thigh. He washes it with solemn reverence, entranced by the ripple of her muscles. She is delicate, his Liese, but so very strong. That strength has saved his life more than once, has beaten a vampire's fangs to his throat. It has loved him, clamped around his undulating hips as he fills her with his need, and one day, it will bear his children into the world.

From crease of thigh to arch of foot and back again. "My wife, she to whom I offer my seed." He sidles around the bed on his knees and begins his work on the opposite leg Crease to arch, and he washes away the sweat and tacky traces of his seed and the dried blood. He sidles to the foot of the bed and slips the cloth between her legs.

An indrawn breath, and she rises to meet it. "Johannes." Her hips rise and fall as she presses against the swatch of cotton.

He watches, mesmerized, as she fucks herself against the cloth. "I never knew you were so wanton, sister," he croaks, eyes fixed on the protuberant nub of her clit.

"You aren't the only one who's waited so long for this," she reminds him, and moans.

He watches as her cunt swells and flushes with blood, a midnight rose unfurling to the moon's light. It's beautiful, sacred, and his mouth cramps with the need to taste of her. He casts the cloth aside and slides between her legs, elbows braced on her thighs to keep them parted. "My wife," he murmurs against her mons, "she in whom I find my rest."

"My love," she answers, and cants her hips.

She's open, so open, and he can smell her, sea salt and honey. He cautiously extends his tongue and gives her clit an experimental lap, and when she throws back her head and practically sings his name, he grins so broadly his fangs ache. _Ah._ He turns his head to mouth her quivering thigh, and then he resumes his quest to reduce her to a limp, inarticulate lump.

_This is grace,_ he thinks as he laps at her and listens to her garbled, keening cries. _Not sleeping in the dirt or eating moldy bread or prostrating myself before the Church Fathers to be humbled and beaten like a worthless slave._ He swirls his tongue around her throbbing clit and is rewarded with a desperate howl.

"My love." A choked, gasping sob, and her hips strain beneath his pinning arms.

"My wife, my salvation and my eternal grace," he murmurs into her cunt, and his love for her is absolute, a dark leviathan rising from the depths of his heart, savage and unrepentant. His tongue emerges for another taste, another draught of wine and honey, and she shudders and jerks and presses closer.

"Johannes," she slurs. "My love."

He brings a hand down to part her swollen lips and teases her distended nub with his lips, and when she splays and rises, hands fisted in his hair, he abruptly sucks it into his mouth. A guttural roar escapes her, and his mouth is flooded with her as she convulses and rocks and gibbers in the throes of ecstatic glossolalia.

He sucks until the small, pert nub stops pulsing, and then he gently nuzzles her folds and rises to cover her. His own desire has returned, and he aligns himself with her as she lies bonelessly beneath him. Her chest heaves, and her eyes are glassy with satisfaction.

"I-," she says feebly.

"Sssh, he croons, and kisses her forehead. "Wife, she whom I love more than myself. This pledge I make to you," he says, and pushes into her. Climax has made her logy and pliant, and he encounters no resistance, only wet, welcoming heat. She whimpers and wraps her arms around him, too spent to cry out. He withdraws completely and pushes inside her again. Because he can. Because there is no Church to call him a sinner for this languid, glorious tenderness. 

"Bound by flesh and witnessed by the Almighty," he says, and groans. He withdraws again and enters her a third time, and he shudders at the intoxicating clutch of her. "That I will know no others for all of my days. Again. "Wherever you go, I will follow, even unto the ends of the earth." Again, and oh, _God_. "And when the end comes, I shall meet it with you, even if it mean my damnation."

He settles into a slow, scrupulous rhythm, hips hooking lazily to the left on every descent, and Liese opens her mouth in a soundless gape, dazed and clinging. He kisses her, caresses her, mouths her throat and sternum, and all the while, he proclaims his love into her mouth and whispers it into her ear as he claims her.

Pleasure is a white-hot fist around his cock, and he reaches down and pulls her legs up to crook around his hips. The angle affords greater penetration, and Liese's eyes roll in their sockets. She tightens around him, nails digging into his shoulders, and he growls at the sulphurous sting of it. So hot and tight and wet, a priceless recompense for all his years of suffering and solitude.

He increases his tempo, chasing the release coiling between his legs. Liese rocks with him, and her heels dig into his ass. 

"Come, husband," she murmurs, and nips and his cheek. "Give me your sons and daughters."

Hips snap forward, well beyond his control now. "I will give you everything," he promises, and buries himself within her as his body seizes with the force of his climax and the bed rattles beneath him. The last thing he sees before his vision goes white is Liese smiling up at him, and he's dimly aware of her hands cradling his face.

"All right," she croons when he returns to himself a few moments later, and she pillows his head against her breasts. "All right." He moves to withdraw from her, but she tightens her legs around him. "Stay. You'll slip out of your own accord." She kisses his sweaty temple.

He nuzzles her sternum and laps salt from her skin. "As you desire, wife," he murmurs. In truth, he hasn't the strength to move. His legs and belly are sprung and loose from his orgasm, and the rest of him is in the grips of a numb lassitude. He could stay here all day, entwined with his Liese, far from the world and its hard faces and merciless hearts.

_My wife,_ he amends. _She is my wife now._ He lifts his head with an effort and kisses beads of sweat from her chin. 

Her hand descends to card through his hair. "You are my desire," she says, her words faint and soft at the edges.

_You should have a ring,_ he decides. _You are no secret, no shame. The world will know you are mine._

A ring, yes, a band of gold to rest upon her finger, a proof of his devotion. She has no need of it, he knows; this is enough for her, this union of body and seed. She has asked nothing of the world save his presence in it. But he wants more. He wants to lavish her with honor and glory, to honor her with proper splendor and ceremony and fill her head and her heart with happy memories to go along with the children he seeds in her belly. Wife she may be, but he is determined that she should have the dignity of a wedding, with lace and wine and a worshipful groom.

He lies with her long after his sated prick slips from her, legs and lips entangled, and as her hands roam his body in gentle, idle exploration, he busies his mind with small, quiet plans.

 

While his adversary basks in the glow of a sacred compact sealed, Priest kneels before the small altar in the throes of spiritual anguish. The floor is hard beneath his knees despite the cushion provided by his cassock, and his muscles ache with sleeplessness. His breath puffs onto his folded hands in plosive bursts, and his eyes burn.

"Father, forgive me, for I have sinned." It's a painful, dry rasp against his thumbs, and his rosary clacks balefully as it swings between his wrists.

The Lord remains silent.

He closes his eyes and rests his forehead against his knuckles and wills himself to focus on the grace that flows through his veins, but it's so faint these days, little more than a vapor of memory within his blood.

_And whose fault is that?_ asks the voice of conscience and self-recrimination inside his head. _Maybe if you were following orders instead of cowering in the barracks like a coward, the Lord would restore you to His favor._

_I have been to the other side, and do you know what I found? Nothing._

His brother's words have haunted his dreams for weeks, have driven him from restless sleep with his heart thundering inside his chest and his pale skin gone clammy and feverish beneath the sheets. They've even infected his waking hours, dogged his steps as he takes meditation or as he wends his way through the market square in search of the meager and increasingly-threadbare supplies that accumulate in the corner of his small room like gathered stones. 

_Nothing._ He had thought them words of pernicious wickedness and empty spite, hurled from the lips of the corrupted, but since his meeting with the Monsignor, he is no longer certain. Sometimes, he thinks he sees them reflected in the eyes of the two surviving acolytes, who, though they have largely recovered from their wounds, moon and shuffle around the barracks like brittle automatons, hunched and hollow-eyed and clutching rosaries in numb, tremulous fingers. Or in the eyes of Priestess Mariel, who has yet to break her frosty silence, and who presides over her kitchen like an intemperate lioness with too little flesh on her bones and the savor of blood behind her teeth.

_I have been to the other side,_ her cold, blank gaze says as he passes. _And do you know what I found? Nothing._

_Nothing, nothing, nothing,_ his footsteps echo as he passes the empty cots where eager, young acolytes had once slept and dreamed of lives filled with greater purpose and holy cause, and nothing is what he tastes when he sits to his evening meal. Just air and bitterness between his teeth.

_If she is with him, then she is apostate,_ Monsignor Chamberlain declares inside his head. _And she should be treated as such._ So cold, stone and steel and Divine retribution, Michael with his flaming sword.

And yet, there had been nothing of majesty in him, nothing of Heaven's might. He'd been a tired old man draped in failing flesh, dealing fatal righteousness with forbidden whiskey on his breath. 

_You've followed the orders of tired old hypocrites for years. Why hesitate now? Liese is just another apostate, another casualty of this endless war._

_Because this is my fault thrice over,_ he thinks and winds the rosary around his fingers. _I was the one who let him slip from my grasp and fall into the darkness. I was the one who let her go on believing he was dead long after I knew the truth, and I was the one who took her and those ill-prepared children on that hunt. She had no business out there, and I knew it, but I was willing to use her as bait to kill the bastard who took my daughter. He's a monster because I couldn't hold on, and she's dead because I didn't tell her the truth._

_And if she isn't dead?_ asks the voice. No trace of accusation now, only curiosity. _If he kept her alive for his own sadistic amusement and the fulfillment of all this thwarted desires?_

He sees the creature in his mind's eye, standing in the middle of the arroyo and watching Liese as she danced upon the wind, scythes flashing in the moonlight. He'd been transfixed, almost awestruck as she'd whirled through the firmament in a dervish of black blood and winking silver, and the longing in his expression had startled him. So tender and horribly familiar that his stomach had lurched in recognition, and just before she'd plummeted from the sky and he'd sprinted toward her, he'd remembered gentle fingers at her temple as she slept.

_It was always her._

He sees Liese, reaching for her lost brother with disbelieving fingers, on her knees in his wavering, distorted shadow. No fear or righteous loathing or cold horror, only old grief reborn and a terrible, childish hope.

_He's not your brother,_ he'd wanted to shout. _He died a long time ago._ But the words would not come, and he'd known that the words would do no good. She could see only the brother she had so loved and mourned so deeply in the battered recesses of her heart, and words would be so much aimless wind in the face of the solidity of his flesh beneath her outstretched hand.

_Anf why shouldn't she? I've already shown him for a liar,_ his brother sneers, and he cannot deny it. He had lied to her with the best of intentions, and it had cost them dearly. Fourteen acolytes are dead, their bodies burned to ash and scattered to the wind, two more are damaged beyond hope of recovery, their minds and wills broken, and Liese, his soft-hearted, ever-mourning sister, is gone.

_And what if she isn't dead or shackled to a bed with her legs spread and her blood poisoned with his venom? What if enough love remained to him that he persuaded her to take the blood of the Queen and join him in his infernal cause? Could you kill her? After all, she has committed no sin against you, has committed no crime save that of trust in the man she loves. If your hunt is successful and you find them in the desert, will you cut her down simply for the sin of loyalty?_

_If she's become like him, then yes,_ he answers, and kisses his rosary beads. _I will have no choice. All that is good in her will have been corrupted just as it was in him. As the Monsignor says, it will be a mercy, and if I'm lucky, I will end her suffering before she stains her soul with innocent blood._

_And if she isn't? If she is whole and untainted, spared by inexplicable fate or some tenacious reservoir of love untouched by the Queen's malice, will you still raise your hands against her, damn her to death for that most Christian of acts, unconditional love? Will you force her to watch him die at your avenging hand and then snap her neck while she weeps over his crumpled body in the dirt? Or will you kill her first because you know there is no wound deep enough to stop her from rising to his defense as long as she draws breath? Will you tear what remains of his heart from his chest and risk a wrath borne of grief and vengeance?_

_He does not grieve. Such emotions are beyond him now._

_Are you sure?_ his conscience persists, and he sees the creature's face as he watched Liese dance, sees the reverent gentleness with which he'd swept her hood from her head. So much of his brother then, a cruel mockery that had made his stomach ache.

_He's gone,_ he insists, and his knees ache with the cold bite of stone.

_You thought that once before, and look where that got you,_ it reminds him. Bloodless, gritty fingers slip through his grasp, and terrified, beseeching eyes glint in the suffocating darkness.

"I'm sorry, brother," he says to his knuckles, and grinds his knees into the stone. "I truly am." He raises his gaze to the wooden cross mounted above the altar. "Forgive me, Father, for my weakness," he pleads. "Forgive me my doubt and grant me the strength to release him from his pain."

_And Liese? What of her pain when you tear everything she has ever loved from her again?_

Liese, eight years old and weeping for the scrawny boy writhing beneath the priest's corrective lash, straining against the priestess whose grip bid her bear witness. Liese, eight years old and creeping through the dark to offer him comfort. Liese, twelve years old and bright and obedient and whispering hope into a cell as she passed on her daily rounds. Liese, eighteen years old and radiant as she and Johannes exchanged secret words in the ordination hall. Liese, twenty-one years old and soaring among the stars as she delivered God's judgment. Liese, twenty-one years old and patiently sopping Johannes' cuts by the barracks' dim light, humming as she worked, heedless of her brother's adoring smile. Liese, twenty-five years old and collapsing in upon herself as she rocked on the sand and bunched her cassock in her fists. Liese, twenty-five years old and shambling across the desert sand and leaving the best of herself behind on the baking, remorseless dunes. Liese, twenty-five years old and emerging from the laundry room with eyes nearly swollen shut and tearstains on her face.

Liese, twenty-seven years old and waiting to die.

"I'm sorry, sister. I'm so very sorry. I have failed you both."

The cross looms above him, unmoved by his entreaties.

"Forgive me," he says, and rises. His heart is set, his choice made.

He will save her if he can, but if he cannot release her from the creature's thrall, then he will do what he must. As the Monsignor said, it would be a mercy.


	8. Dinner and a Spot of Shopping, or, Love Is Educational

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains blood-drinking and discussions and depictions of menstruation.

He watches them from the shadows afforded by a large, looming outcropping. There are three of them, scrawny, dirty bandits all pith and sinew. They huddle around a low, banked campfire, hunkered over cans of cold beans and canned meat clutched in grimy hands. They laugh and grunt and murmur amongst themselves about prospects for a successful raid against a merchant caravan bout for the remote outpost three miles north. Grim pickings, opines the one nearest him, an emaciated waif with sunken eyes and the phlegmatic rattle of the consumptive in his lungs. He coughs and spits frothy saliva onto the sand, and he can smell the diseased taint of it, plaque and bile and rancid fat.

 _Not that one,_ he thinks as the man wipes thick stringers of saliva from his lips with the back of his hand. _Just a quick twist of the neck for him. I don't want to pass anything to Liese._

In truth, none of the three is an appealing target. They're filthy and teeming with lice, and he suspects they'll yield precious little blood for the work of killing them, but he's left the hunt too long, and his belly aches with hunger. The need to feed simmers and throbs in the marrow of his bones, a deep-tissue itch he can't quite reach, and his lips peel from his teeth in a reflexive snarl. He can smell it beneath the dirt and fetid odor of piss and shit and unwashed bodies, the heady aroma of blood. Not the good stuff, the unparalleled ambrosia of a priest or the nectar he'd lapped from Liese's obliging cunt a few hours ago as she'd sprawled on their bed with her legs parted and her cassock rucked above her hips in invitation, but it will do. His mouth waters in invitation.

 _Just a few hours, and I'll return to you,_ he thinks as he creeps forward in a predatory crouch, and in his mind's eye, he sees her as he had left her, curled happily on the couch in the parlor with a book from his library. 

_Be careful, sweetheart,_ she'd murmured against lips that still tasted of her. _Come home to me._

 _Home._ The word inspires a frisson of longing, and he clenches his fists against the temptation to turn and retreat to its embrace even as instinct drives him forward. Home. He wants to go home, to Liese and her smile and her slow, lazy kisses and her touch against his skin. He wants to brush the hair from her temple and press his forehead to hers as they sit on the couch in a Gordian tangle of limbs. He wants to hear her humming as she practices her sewing by the light of tapers and kerosene lanterns and listen to the familiar rattle around in the kitchen. He wants to read in bed while she cards her fingers through his hair and drops affectionate kisses to his bare shoulder. He wants to feel her hands in his hair as she kneels beside the tub and scrubs the grit from his scalp in a billow of scented soap. He wants to coax her into the too-small tub with him and delight in the slick slide of their bodies as he holds her against his chest and kisses her wet hair. He wants to feel the warmth of her hands on his as she pares his nails and tends his neglected cuticles and scrubs the dirt from the beds with meticulous care.

Home, from whence flows all the love he has ever known. Not just in the sinuous twine of their bodies, but in the touch of entangled fingers, no longer fleeting and clandestine, but lingering and languid and sweet as his first breath. In the first dry-mouthed kiss in the morning when the sun sinks low and the heat rises from the sand in a humid, beseeching breath, and in the last one at night when the sun rises in a bleary, yellow haze and all creatures great and small shy from its scorching caress. In the smile she flashes him over breakfast, adoring and so happy that it steals his breath and fills him with savage pride.

 _I did that. I gave her the peace that a lifetime of prayers and never could,_ he thinks as she reaches for his hand over a plate of eggs and sausage, and triumph tastes like coffee black as it comes. 

A never-ending glut of it, and he would be there now if he could, curled against her in their bed(and it is their bed now, every fiber imbued with them to the bedsprings and the brass headboard smudged and smeared with their fingerprints) and massaging the tension from her back until the cramps released their vicious hold and let her sleep. Her blood had come hard and heavy two days ago, a startling, crimson freshet on the white sheets, and he'd panicked at first, sure that he'd done her some hurt in the frenzy of his lust, but she had only laughed and told him that it was her monthly bleeding and staggered from the room to clean herself up. 

He'd sat in the bed, transfixed by the vivid smear of red. He had known that women bled, of course, had often seen his sisters slipping off into bathrooms and behind rocks with hanks of wadded cotton in their hands, but he hadn't expected it to be so much, or so bright. He could smell it, copper and iron and salt on the air, and his stomach had rumbled greedily. He'd known how it would taste, had already sampled it from her fingers as she'd ridden him in delirious offering, and he'd longed for more. He'd been tempted to lap it from the sheets and ease the relentless cramp of his hunger, but instead, he'd thrown back the covers and followed her into the bathroom, where he'd found her sitting in the tub, blood seeping between her thighs.

He'd sat on the edge of the tub and reached out to caress her cheek. Too pale, and her eyes had been tired despite the night's rest.

 _Are you all right?_ Worry had settled in his grumbling belly at the sight of more blood.

She'd turned into his caress. _I'm fine, darling, I promise. It's just my cycle. It's always heavier when it's been suppressed for a while. I took something before the hunt, and now it's making up for lost time._ She'd grimaced and sat up.

_Does it hurt?_

_Considerably,_ she'd admitted. _The worst of it will pass in a day or so. Until then, I'll just have to grin and bear it._

 _Does anything help?_ More blood oozed into the water.

A soft huff of laughter. _Mariel used to brew a tea that helped. Cohosh, I think. Otherwise, it was ibuprofen. Warm water would help, too, but..._ She'd shrugged. _As I said, it'll pass._

He'd lifted her from the tub over her squawk of surprise and carried her back to the bed, where he'd covered her with the sheet.

 _Johannes, the mess,_ she'd protested as the sheet had clung to her wet skin, but he'd paid her no mind as he'd stalked to the door, wrenched it open, and barked at the familiar to boil water to fill the tub, hot as it could.

He'd returned to the bed. _I'll take care of you._ He'd stroked the wet ends of her hair.

 _You always do._ She'd raised her head and kissed the inside of his wrist.

_Is there anything you need to eat? Drink?_

_Just water and a lot of iron. Red meat, spinach, beans._

_I'll get them all._ His stomach had gurgled in sympathy, and his eyes had been drawn to the blood soaking into the sheets. It had been drying by then, and of no use to him, but his stomach had cried out for its sweet sustenance.

 _Are_ you _all right?_ she'd asked, and cupped his cheek. _You seem preoccupied._

He'd mustered a smile. _I'm just worried about you,_ he'd said, and his gaze had drifted to the stained bedclothes again.

Hers had followed suit. _Are you hungry?_ she'd asked softly, and drawn her thumb over the corner of his mouth.

He'd shifted on the bed, reluctant to admit his need. She knew he was different, knew he'd been tainted and forever altered by the Queen's gift, but she'd never seen its price, never seen him slathered in blood from nose to chin and sopping it out of the collar of his shirt or washing shirts stiff with gore in the washbucket in the lean-to. She'd never seen him washing a fine, red mist from his eyebrows. He'd been afraid that the truth would diminish the love she bore him, or perhaps strangle it altogether and leave him with nothing but a mouthful of blood and regret, bitter as wormwood on his tongue.

 _I need to feed,_ he'd confessed, and shame had burned in his belly and warmed his nape.

_Then you should. I knew you were a vampire when I went with you and when I loved you. I can hardly complain now._

_I don't want to leave you. Not when you're like this._

She'd laughed, soft as the wind dancing over the sand. _It's my period, not a fatal hemorrhage._ She'd rolled onto her back and reached up to muss his tousled hair. _It's all right if you need to go._ When he'd obdurately remained seated on the bed, she'd sighed. _My poor, devoted love,_ she'd crooned. _You're being ridiculous. Would it help if I-_ She'd trailed off and slowly raised the sheets to expose her cunt.

 _I can't,_ he'd managed even as his mouth had gone dry and his belly had cramped with ravenous want. _I don't want to hurt you._

 _You won't. You're my husband,_ she'd answered, and parted her thighs in wordless invitation.

He'd resisted, but only for a moment. The hunger had been too long neglected, the memory of her taste too sublime. He'd descended upon her with a helpless whine, pushing her knees up and her thighs apart. The heady scent of blood and arousal had overridden every tender impulse, and he'd lapped at her with mindless abandon. Blood on his nose and lips and chin, and she'd bucked and writhed beneath his greedy, flicking tongue, hands in his hair as she grunted and keened. Her arousal had pleased him, but it had been secondary to the demands of his aching, starving stomach, and he'd plunged his tongue into her folds in search of that blessed manna. Even when she'd shuddered beneath his mouth in the throes of ecstatic release, he'd persisted, lapping and sucking every last drop of briny sweetness. Liese had simply trembled beneath his industrious, insatiable mouth and mewled helplessly whenever he stroked hypersensitive flesh. Wave after wave of that sweetest of wines poured from that most precious of fonts, and he'd come against the bedsheets with an atavistic surge of his hips.

He'd been breathless and panting by the time he'd looked up. Liese had gazed down at him with glassy, heavy-lidded eyes, her expression inscrutable, and fear had coiled, cold proprietary fingers around his heart. 

_I disgust her,_ he'd thought miserably. _Liese?_ He'd pressed a tentative kiss to her slick thigh. He'd longed for her hand to card through his hair, and he'd fought the childish impulse to press himself into her hands. _I'm sorry. Please don't be angry with me,_ he'd thought wildly. _I can't help it. When the hunger comes, it's the cold steel of a thousand scalpels in my flesh. You'll never have to see it again._ Shame had welled in his heart, and he'd shrunk from her scrutiny and buried his face in her thigh.

 _What's this now?_ Surprise, and her hands had found him at last and stroked his hair. _Sweetheart, it's all right. Everything is all right._

He'd groped for her hand and squeezed it. _I'm sorry,_ he mumbled into her thigh even as his stomach reveled in the taste of her and warmth spread through his veins, poppy and mulled wine. _I shouldn't have... You'll never... I won't..._ Keenly aware of the blood cooling on his chin and teeth.

_Johannes... You've endured enough shame for three lifetimes. No more, do you hear me? Especially not for this. You've done nothing wrong._

He'd lifted his head from the shelter of her thigh. _But this disgusts you. I disgust you._

 _No,_ she'd said firmly. _You don't. You never did, and you never could. Come. Come here, love,_ she'd said, and opened her arms.

He'd scrambled into her embrace, careful to keep his bloody face away from hers.

 _As for this-,_ She'd waved a dismissive hand over her wet, blood-smeared thighs. _-it is what it is. You're a vampire. You need to feed. It's not glamorous, but it gets the job done. It's what you need to survive, and if I can give that to you, then I will. Blood washes. Besides,_ she'd murmured, and craned to kiss his temple. _It's not like I didn't enjoy it, or were you so focused on your infernal bloodlust that you didn't notice?_

 _Oh, I noticed,_ he'd answered, and his scalp had smarted with the memory of her hands fisted in his hair. _I just don't want you to think less of me._

 _Or stop loving me,_ he'd added silently.

 _No danger of that, sweetheart,_ she'd promised him. and mouthed the cross etched into his forehead. _Wisdom has it that orgasms relieve cramps._

_Did it?_

_A little, but they'll be back. Come take a bath with me?_

He'd been only too happy to follow her into the bathroom, where a tub of steaming water had awaited. She'd winced as she'd stepped into the nigh-scalding water, but she'd moaned when the hot water had risen over the small of her back and belly. She'd leaned forward with an effort to let him climb in behind her, and then she'd sagged against him, head lolling. He'd promptly wrapped her in a protective embrace, arms around her middle and chin propped on her shoulder. She'd drowsed, slack and content, and he'd held vigil over her and watched the blood swirl in the water. Now and then, he'd hummed into her ear and sloshed water over her shoulders and idly cupped her breasts to soothe her. They'd stayed that way until they'd leached the last of the heat from the water, and then he'd washed the blood from his face and coaxed her out. He'd brushed his teeth while she dressed, and then he'd led her to the kitchen and fed her toast and jam and strong coffee and a bowl of oatmeal.

To his surprise--and unbridled delight--she'd offered herself again the following morning, guiding his head between her thighs with the setting of the sun, and her needy, breathless little cries had intoxicated him as much as the blood that coated his tongue. 

_There, love, there,_ she'd pleaded, and thrust against his face.

 _Pull up your nightdress,_ he'd ordered, and she'd obeyed, hiking it above her hips. _More,_ he'd growled. _I want to see you._

She'd pulled it up to her chin, and he'd keened at the sight of her breasts. They'd bobbed in time to the wanton undulation of her hips, and he'd plunged his stiffened tongue into her to plunder every drop of the ambrosia she offered. She'd come once, twice, three times under the merciless ministrations of his tongue, and she'd sobbed feebly when he'd finally fucked her, too spent to thrust in counterpoint. His orgasm had come in half a dozen brutal, spasmodic thrusts, and he had roared his ecstasy and love into the crook of her neck. He was so much stronger than she was, and he'd been acutely aware of her fragile body as he'd eased out of her and cradled her to him and murmured endearments and apologies into her ear.

A third offering this morning, though there had been markedly less than before, and he had loved her slowly and thoroughly after in recompense and gratitude for her selfless bounty. No frantic rutting then, but a lingering, reverent dance of joined bodies. Entangled fingers and entwined limbs and the softness of her lips against his flesh. She'd even kissed him, heedless of the blood on his lips and tongue and teeth, and the sigh she'd breathed into him as her tongue slithered into his mouth had sent him over the edge. He'd spent himself with a muffled cry and a convulsive jerk of his hips, and she'd held him inside her until he'd softened and slipped from her despite her efforts.

Two days. It had bought him two precious days to remain cocooned in domestic bliss and care for her through the worst of her bleeding. Two days in which to bundle her in blankets and ply her with hot compresses for her belly and back. Two days in which to scour his limited medical library for a hint as to the ingredients of Priestess Mariel's tea while she curled on the couch and dozed to escape the worst of her cramps. Two days to be a proper doting husband.

But the hunger is indomitable and cannot be slaked by so little blood, or by willpower. He'd tried once, when he'd first awakened to find himself transformed. He'd been confused and appalled by the alien, insatiable hunger for that which had once so repulsed him, and he'd stubbornly refused to feed, had huddled in the bowels of the hive and clutched his burning, spasming stomach and prayed for the Father to relieve his agony. But just as He'd ignored his pleas for mercy and salvation while his enemies had devoured him alive, there had come no respite from heaven, no angel with tender hands and a flagon of Leithe's waters to make him forget his pain. Only dampness and silence and darkness, and the incessant whisper of the Queen inside his throbbing head as she encouraged him to go forth and feed and end his needless suffering.

Two days were all he had lasted before he broke beneath the torment. He'd crawled out of the hive, too weak to stand, and promptly been blinded by the dazzling light of the moon and stars. He'd reeled at the sudden, stinging brightness. Everything had been too loud and too bright, and he'd clapped his hands to his ears to shut out the discordant thunder of a thousand unseen heartbeats and wept like a terrified child, starving and tired and desperate to return to the swaddling safety of the hive.

But the hunger had been relentless, and it had driven him to grub in the sand in search of beetles and burrowing snakes and spiders. He'd found them all and crammed them into his mouth, indifferent to the clitter and squirm of insectile legs against his tongue and the muted crunch of carapace and cartilage and bone between his teeth. Some he'd spat onto the sand once he'd extracted what blood he could, but most he'd swallowed. The snakes had provided the most, and he'd bitten off their heads and glutted himself on them as they'd thrashed and spurted in his hands. Each drop had been elixir, a sweet relief from the agony in his guts. Still, it hadn't been enough. He'd needed more, so much more.

He'd staggered unsteadily through the desert in the tatters of his robes and devoured whatever he could. Lizards. Rats. Gila monsters. His first substantial kill had been an emaciated coyote, old and mangy and battle-scarred. It had sunk its fangs into his forearm as he'd struggled to snap its neck, but the hunger had been stronger than the pain, and he'd crushed its throat with his hands and sunk his fangs into the filthy, matted fur. Dirt and sweat and God knew what else on his tongue, and over that, an impossible sweetness, ambrosia and honey as blood pulsed into his gullet with every fading beat of the creature's heart. He'd wept again, this time from relief, and when he had slurped the carcass dry, he'd dropped it to the sand and turned his face to the gentle caress of the moon. No more pain, no more gnawing hunger, only blissful contentment.

No human blood that night. That had come three days later, when he'd stumbled upon a gang of bandits. Much like these, actually. They'd mistaken him for an easy mark, a lost traveler dying alone in the desert, and tried to bludgeon him with cudgels and heavy irons. His flesh had bruised under the assault, and bones had cracked, but rage had anesthetized him to the blows. He'd howled as he'd fallen upon them, fangs bared and eyes blazing, and he'd reveled in their terror as he'd repaid their savagery in kind. High, animal screams as he'd wrenched arms from sockets and snapped legs like matchsticks, and to this day, he can still remember the soft, glottal gurgle when he'd reached out and thrust his fingers into the viscera of a man as he'd charged him with with iron upraised. The logy befuddlement in his eyes as he'd collapsed to his knees and emptied his entrails onto the sand. He'd looked almost sleepy as the strength had drained from him. Then his head had lolled on his pudgy neck, and he'd lunged for the weak flutter of his pulse. 

It had been a revelation, and he'd moaned deliriously as it had washed over his tongue. His hips had rocked, cock straining inside his underwear, and he'd growled and bucked and sunk his fangs ever deeper. The body had twitched, and he'd whined and come in his pants, fingers piercing the flabby flesh at the back of the man's neck until they snagged tendon. Blood, so much more blood than he had ever imagined, and so far superior to any he had ever tasted. The ambrosia of priest's blood years unknown to him.

He'd feasted that night, drunk until his belly sloshed and groaned in protest, and it was then, as he'd crouched over the bodies with blood dripping from his chin, that he'd begun to grasp the untapped power within him. It had surged within him like an electrical current, and he'd thrown his head back and laughed, dizzy with the possibilities. He'd danced a merry jig amid the bodies and run as fast and as far as his legs could carry him, arms outstretched as though he were flying. Miles and miles, and he had never wearied, never grown winded. He'd climbed with ease, clambered over rocks and scaled cliff faces that would have shattered mortal men, and just before the sun had risen, he'd climbed the highest plateau he could find and gazed upon the landscape in awe.

 _And behold what the Lord hath made,_ he'd thought as he'd taken in the vast expanse of desert sand surrounded by buttes and plateaus as old as the earth, unspoiled save for a handful of ramshackle settlements that sprouted like invasive fungi from the earth. And in the distance, the leaden, grey smudge of the city he'd died to protect.

He'd thought to go to it then, to return to the barracks and reunite with his brothers and sisters and share his newfound knowledge with them. To find his Liese and offer her so much more. But in each loose settlement and outpost he'd visited, he'd found only hatred and fear. They'd recoiled from his golden eyes and his fangs and run from him when he'd tried to speak. Outstretched hands had been met with slaps and shoves and gobbets of saliva in his face. They'd kicked him and hurled rocks at him, and the men had scurried for their guns and hidden behind windows like cowards. Demon, they'd called him, abomination. He'd taken a round of buckshot in the side and crawled away, sure that he would die, but the wound had mended by sundown, the pellets pushed from his flesh like expelled splinters.

He'd returned in the night with the memory of his own blood in his mouth and slaughtered every man over the age of twelve.

He'd known then that he could never go home, never return to the world he'd defended to the death, and soon, goodwill had curdled into bitterness and loathing. With each slap and rock that found its mark, with each epithet hurled at him from ungrateful lips, he'd regretted less and less the need to take a life to sustain his own. Soon, he'd come to enjoy it, to make a game of it. He'd sacrificed himself, lost his every hope in their name. He'd lost his chance for a life with Liese, and the ungrateful maggots dared to curse him in lieu of gratitude. He would not grieve for them, wouldn't weep for those who had no tears for him.

 _Well, you have your Liese now,_ his heart whispers with satisfaction. _She's waiting for you at home._

 _Come home to me, sweetheart,_ she murmurs, and kisses him, her lips warm and pliant as he cradles her face in his hands.

 _I will,_ he vows as he creeps closer to his prey. Almost close enough to touch now, and his throat works as he smells the blood in their veins. _Just going for dinner and a bit of shopping._

It's over in seconds, a flurry of feebly-struggling limbs and snapping bones and screams abruptly silenced. One manages to gash his arm with a bowie knife, and the pain flares, hot and vicious, but it's swiftly quelled by adrenaline and fury and his insatiable need to feed. He snarls and squeezes the offending wrist until the bones pulverize into powdery shards, and then his gaping mouth descends to the squirming man's throat. His shriek of anguish is swallowed by the tide of blood that gushes from the wound, and he croons as the first hot rush sluices over his teeth and down his throat. He grinds the ruined bones because he can and hums as the man thrashes and gargles in his grip. The gash in his arm throbs once, twice, and then begins to itch as the flesh knits together. Another wrench of the shattered wrist to prompt another spasm of agony and attendant surge of adrenaline, and the blood gouts into his mouth. 

The merciless, wracking hunger eases with every swallow, and he closes his eyes as languid warmth replaces the pain. Heady as the slow burn of a good scotch in the center of his chest. The body twitches and goes slack, and the smell of shit hits his nostrils. He wrinkles his nose against the muddy, loamy stink of it, and sucks until he pulls nothing but air. Then he lets the body drop and steps over it, careful not to step in the filth, and stalks his next morsel, which lies a few feet away. He watches in amusement for a moment as the man drags himself toward a revolver holstered near the campfire. His spine is broken and bulges grotesquely against the fabric of his shirt, and his legs drag uselessly behind him.

"Aw," he says, and crouches beside the man as he scrabbles and writhes in the sand. "And he shall crawl upon his belly over the ground, and eat of the dust of the earth." 

Terrified eyes roll toward him at the sound of his voice, and the man sobs and claws at the hard-packed sand in an effort to pull himself away. 

He laughs and picks up a handful of sand. "Well?" he says. "Bon apetit." He seizes him by the hair and crams the sand into his mouth.

The man screams and twists pathetically in his grasp, but he only succeeds in tearing out a clump of hair. He tries to spit out the sand, but Johannes only grins and claps his hand over his mouth.

"Eat it," he orders, the low, deadly rumble of shifting earth. "Eat it just like I had to." He scoops up another handful and shoves it into the man's mouth.

The man gags and splutters and sobs, and gritty saliva dangles from his lips. "Please," he begs around the clot of sand in his mouth. "Please, mister."

"Swallow it." He releases his hold on the man's scalp and gives it a convivial pat. 

"Please."

"Swallow it. You won't like it if I have to tell you again."

The man utters a strangled sob, and his throat spasms as he fights to swallow the suffocating, congealing mass.

"Tastes like hell, doesn't it?" He clucks in sympathy. "That'll happen when you're eating other people's feet and sweat and horse shit. I ate it for years. It got into everything--bread, jerky, soup, canned beans. This constant grit in the back of your throat and lodged between your teeth. My wife did, too. Of course, I always tried to pick it out of hers. Sometimes, I think I ate more sand than food. Comes out in your shit, too, but you won't live long enough for that to matter." He pats the man on the back.

Galvanized by terror, his hapless quarry lunges for the gun that lies just out reach, but without his legs to propel him, he only flails in the sand like a helpless crab. 

Johannes smiles and ruffles his hair. "I almost admire your pep," he says, and then he stands and brings his booted foot down on the man's forearm.

It shatters with a wet, muffled snap, bone china dropped into an egg crate, and the man shrieks. His bladder looses with a wet hiss, and the jungly stink makes his eyes water.

"You bastard!" the man shrieks. "You fucking hellspawn! You're going to burn in hell!"

A humorless laugh. "I've already done my time," he tells him, and brings his foot down on the man's mangled arm and grinds it beneath his heel. "Your turn," he sings as the man wails and convulses and begs God to save him.

"That won't work," he says. "Believe me, I've tried." He raises his foot and stomps it into the back of the man's neck. There's another muffled snap, and the interminable caterwauling ceases abruptly.

Johannes returns to his crouch and gazes into the man's eyes. Still alive, but only just. A few seconds, and the brain will figure out that that all vital connections have been severed. 

He reaches out to caress the man's cheek. "You asked for deliverance," he murmurs, and marvels at the delicate flutter of his eyelashes. "Well, looks like I'm it. What can I say? The Lord works in mysterious ways."

He watches until the light fades from the man's eyes, and then he rises and crosses to the third member of this fine little party, who lies in an ugly sprawl beside a battered, dusty speeder bike laden with grime-smudged bags. Loot from their previous victims, like as not. He makes a mental note to take inventory once the party's over. Perhaps there will be something of use, money or clothes or food. Medicine. Jewelry for his Liese. 

"Well, well, I never would've picked you to get the farthest." He nudges the scrawny consumptive with the toe of his boot. "I guess appearances can be deceiving."

"Please," he pleads, grubby hands held up in supplication. "Please, don't kill me. I-I can be of use to you."

"Can you now? How do you figure that?"

"You're a bandit, right? I'm an excellent thief," he babbles. "I know all the best places to hide."

"No," he huffs in amusement. "I'm not a bandit." He bares his bloody fangs.

His new playmate quails. "Please! Please! I don't want to die. Take me as a familiar. I'll serve you faithfully."

"You've got nothing I want." _One taste of you, and I'd be puking my guts for a week._ "Besides, you're dying already. I can smell it on you." It was on his breath, the high, sweet stink of raging infection.

"Please! Please! Please, mister, I don't want to die!" He reaches for the toe of his boot.

"Please! Please! I don't want to die!" Johannes sneers, and kicks his hand away. "Well, guess what? Neither did I. I spent my life serving God and his Church, protecting you maggots so that you could go on killing and stealing and fucking and breeding like rats, and what did I ever get in return? Gratitude? Fellowship? A simple thank you from the people I saved? Did a single one of them ever offer to tend my wounds or let me sit by the warmth of their fires? No. They never so much as looked at me, and when I died, not a single one of them cared that I was gone. They just went on fucking and fighting and killing and left me to die alone in a hole."

"I'm sorry," the man blubbers. "I had nothing to do with it."

Sorry?" he snarls. "I lost her for two years because of you, because I believed humanity was worth saving. I almost lost everything!" He draws back his foot and kicks him in the ribs. "If the Queen hadn't been an angel of mercy, I would've died in there." Another kick, and bone splinters. The man screams. "It took days. Weeks."

He's lost to the memory. Fangs in his flesh and piss cooling on his thighs, and his throat so dry for want of water that he gladly would have drunk it. Gelid tongues lapping the blood from his feverish skin and probing greedily into his wounds and filthy claws harrowing fresh ones when those ran dry. Flies crawling over his eyes and his cracked lips and maggots squirming in the shit the vampires left on his twitching limbs.

He'd been so cold nearly the end that not even the thought of Liese loving him could inspire warmth, and the flies had crawled into his mouth with every shallow breath. Cold and dying and covered in maggot-infested shit and scarcely able to dream of the life he had wanted, and this puling, worthless, rancid morsel thought it could gain salvation from a sniveled apology?

He growls and stomps on his twisted leg, and splinters of bone push through the skin, maggots rising from putrescent flesh. "Where was your sympathy when I was broken and starving?" he demands over the pitiful vermin's piercing screams. "Where was it when I longed for a single sip of warm broth or a ragged blanket?" He stomps again, this time on the man's ankle, and it gives beneath his boot like rotten wood. "Where was it when the Church forbade me the touch and comfort of the woman I loved? Where was it when they robbed me of the chance for a family?" Maggots on his flesh, and he's cold, cold to the bone, and his foot comes down on the man's concave chest.

"You're sorry," he spits, and contempt drips from his fangs in a bloody froth. "You're only sorry because you think it will save you." He gazes down at this simpering creature in the dirt, broken and rotten and begging for its life with piss on his shattered legs and insincere apologies on his lips. His eyes bulge from cadaverous sockets, and he watches the tiny capillaries in them burst and turn his irises pink. He applies more pressure to his shattered sternum, and blood bubbles over his lips in a pink foam. 

Flies on his lips and inside his nostrils. Grubs pulsating on his bloodied flesh like infected buboes. Cockroaches skittering over his legs.

 _That's what you are,_ he thinks as the man wheezes and splutters and coughs up diseased blood in a fine, red mist. _Just a cockroach trying to escape._

"It won't," he says, and crushes his chest beneath his heel.

His foot rises and falls over and over again, until there's nothing left of the man's face and torso but a gelatinous paste of organ and bone. He stops only when his descending foot strikes sand, and then he scrapes his fouled boot against the side of the speeder bike with a moue of distaste. His quad thrums with the pleasant burn of exertion, and the anger that fed his frenzy recedes and leaves only a languid satisfaction at a job well done.

He hums as he reaches for a bag and rummages through the contents. Wallets and drawstring bags, mostly, though there are a few bits of jewelry and some silver hip flasks that might fetch a few dollars at a willing pawnbroker. He sets it aside and picks up another. Earrings and watches and fistfuls of crumpled bills. A gold tooth. A third bag holds a few cheap, silver plates and candlesticks, and he casts it aside. A fourth bag holds canned goods and a few bottles of pills. He pockets the latter for future inspection. He has no need of medicine, but Liese is still vulnerable to sickness and the world's cruel predations.

 _Only until she accepts the blood of the Queen. Then nothing can take her from you._

His heart soars at the thought, and he sings tunelessly as he dumps the canned good and candlesticks onto the sand and reorganizes the contents of the bags to make them easier to carry. Then he swings his leg over the bike and starts the engine. He revs the throttle to test the engine, and when it doesn't cough or sputter, he releases the kickstand and the brake and rockets over the sand. The wind caresses his face as he rides, and he leans into it. The last of his anger is gone. He's happy, content. The bike was an unexpected stroke of luck. It will cut down on his travel time and get him home to Liese that much sooner. She'd been fine when he'd left her on the couch with that lingering kiss and the company of a book, but experience has taught him how quickly the tide can change.

He rides until the lights of the ragtag outpost come into view, and then he kills the engine and glides to a stop. He doesn't want the noise attracting attention. It's late, and most decent folk should be long asleep in their beds, but outposts like this don't call to the dubious best and brightest of human society, and there's bound to be a rumpot or two lurching through the deserted streets, and even the worst of them would remember a stranger with yellow eyes.

He hides the bike and its booty behind a jumble of boulders and crouches to survey the settlement. It's a single wide avenue bracketed by two rows of wooden buildings. A saloon, dark and silent, and a small hotel and brothel. Lights wink from upstairs windows, and sinuous shadows dance on the filmy curtains. His lips twitch at the memory of joined bodies atop a coverlet in a whorehouse window. His first glimpse of the forbidden. He turns his attention to the other buildings. A blacksmith. A hostelry. A doctor. A general store fronted by a pair of hitching posts. And at the far end, shrouded in shadow, the clapboard church with its haughty steeple upthrust like a chastising finger.

It's the general store that interests him. According to the familiar and his loose network of spies, it offers a limited selection of fabric for the local housewives. Nothing exotic, just cotton and wool and gingham and muslin. There were occasional rumors of silk and satin. And as of yesterday, whispers of lace.

 _Every bride should have lace,_ he thinks as he surveils the store. It's as dark and silent as the saloon across the street. There's no movement from the darkened upstairs window; the proprietor and his brood are either gone or asleep.

Still, he waits. He's had his fill of killing for the night, and if he rouses the town, he'll have to move on and uproot Liese from the home they've just begun to establish. When an hour passes with no sign of activity or a night watchman, he rises and strides toward the quiet settlement.

There's no electricity here in the hinterlands; that is a luxury reserved for the cities, a gift the Church bestows upon the ragged, starving faithful. He glides through the enveloping darkness on noiseless feet, alert for the wobbling tread of unsteady feet or the muffled gasps of a prostitute plying her wares behind the blacksmith's, skirt hiked above her hips and ass polishing the soot-smeared anvil. But the drunks and whores have all burrowed in for what remains of the night. A muted scuttling to his left, but it's only a startled opossum, and he dips his head in greeting as it peers at him with baleful, luminescent eyes and bares its fangs at him.

He skirts the building to the rear in search of a tradesman's entrance and is relieved to find one. A test of the knob shows it to be locked, but it's old and cheap besides and disintegrates in his grip. He lets the crushed knob drop to the sand and opens the door with a faint squeak of untended hinges. He pauses, fingers curled around the door, but when there comes no cautious thump of slippered feet upon the stairs, he slips inside and closes the door behind him.

He finds himself with a small office to the left and a larger stockroom to the right. He steps into the latter and scans his surroundings. Boxes of canned and dry goods line the near wall, stacked five high and labeled in a brutish, untidy scrawl. More boxes on the opposite wall, but these contain sundries--toothpaste, soap, borax. Another stack holds crude medical supplies of alcohol, cotton batting, and castor oil. Bottles of aspirin. He stuffs a few of these last into the pockets of his duster and resolves to return for the rest once his intended errand is finished. The wall to his right hosts flimsy metal shelves stocked with batteries and cans of lantern oil and coils of rope. The bottommost shelf bears shovels and pickaxes and posthole diggers. A lone saddle sits in the corner, dusty and forlorn. Probably taken for payment of debt or in exchange for beans and corn and coarse flour that scoured the teeth. Of silks and lace, there is no sign.

He creeps from the room and into the store proper to find more shelves, these low and wooden and home to more canned and dry goods and cleaning agents and miscellaneous tools. There are also a handful of small, covered tables arrayed with pairs of shoes and gloves for workmen and ladies. He stops to examine the latter, but the material is stiff and too dry between his fingers, and anyway, he can't imagine his Liese with her lovely hands covered. He releases them and wipes his hand on his jeans and continues his perusal.

Belts and cheap tack adorn the walls like hides on display, and a handful of rifles hang from a slotted rack behind the counter. These are flanked on either side by shelves filled with tobacco pouches and boxes of ammunition. He peers behind the counter in a fit of idle curiosity to find more ammunition, boxes of thick cotton pads labeled _Feminine Hygiene_ , and small boxes of transparent balloons. Intrigued, he plucks one from the shelf and studies it.

 _Lubricated condoms,_ proclaims the front. His brow furrows in confusion, and he flips it to the back. _Coated with spermicidal liquid to prevent pregnancy._ His expression clears. A fornication glove. At least that's what the ancient priest who'd presided over his catechism classes had called it. A means for the wicked to indulge in their basest, most sinful desires without fear of the natural consequence thereof. A means by which to thwart the will of the Almighty. He snorts and tosses it aside. The only thing in which he intends to sheath his cock is his wife's most willing cunt. He does, however, grab a package of the cotton pads and tuck it under one arm.

The chief objects of his desire he finds stuffed into wooden, crosstie racks behind a shelf full of shampoos and cans of wax. Fat bolts of fabric jut from half a dozen cubbies, and he reaches up to examine them. The gingham is a harsh nap against his fingertips, inviting as burlap, and he recoils with a grimace, but the cotton and wool are pleasing to the touch. Either would make fine wedding robes, and Liese could use them for summer and winter cassocks. He hums in satisfaction. The satin is glorious, cool and sensual beneath his fingers, and the silk is even better. He chuckles in delight and imagines them against Liese's delicate skin, the languid glide of them over her breasts and buttocks, the heady bunch of them in his palms as he smoothed them over the fabric in a worshipful caress. He sighs in anticipation and reluctantly moves to the lace.

This he handles with assiduous care. He'd thought it would be thick and heavy, the stuff of curtains and doilies yellowed with age and the dirt from widows' dry palms, but it's delicate, fragile as baby's breath in his hands. Sheer and light, and he can see it over Liese's face as they kneel at the altar and imagine it draped over her shoulders and back as she takes her oaths a second time and binds herself to him forever.

 _She already has,_ notes a voice inside his head. _Very enthusiastically. In your bed._

Yes, and he savors every moment, every breath of it, but this will be a celebration, a covenant wrought in defiance of the Church. She will be the beautiful bride he had always meant for her to be before that fatal raid. No rice in her hair, no warm summer sunshine, no love beneath an oak with dew upon the grass, but he can give her bridal lace and silver moonlight in her hair. He can worship her as she deserves, hold her up as the goddess she is, and when the vows have been cast to the wind and sand like fine drops of holy water, he will feel this lace beneath his hands as he sinks into her.

He's jolted from his reverie by a ponderous creak upon the stair. He swallows an obscenity and melts into the shadows that ooze from the corners like pitch, and a few moments later, the proprietor appears, rifle in hand. He's an enormous, rotund man clad in flannel pajamas and tatty slippers, and he and the floor wheeze in concert as he shuffles into the center of the room.

"Is anyone here?" he calls. He takes a cautious step and scans the room. "Come out if you're in here. I heard you shuffling."

Johannes considers his options. If he holds his tongue, the shopkeep might chalk it up to the nocturnal revelry of rats and go back to bed, but there's no guarantee he won't be back the minute he moves. If he runs, he risks a round in the back, and while that would ordinarily be but a temporary inconvenience, the gunfire would likely draw the rest of the town, which would no doubt delight in torturing him to death. Hell, they'd probably make a festival of it and encourage their children to kick him as he lay dying and poke candy-sticky fingers into his wounds. He could negotiate, but the odds of success are slim, and if the negotiations conclude in gunfire, that, too, will draw the town.

He slips behind the man as he clutches his rifle in a pudgy hand and blinks stupidly at the front door, and wraps his arm around the man's wattled throat. One abrupt squeeze, and the man's throat collapses like a crushed paper cup. He lowers him to the floor to minimize noise, and then he stands over him as he strangles. Spittle dribbles from his mouth, and his face is a deep, bruised puce. Bulging eyes roll in their sockets, and he sees the realization in his face, the horrified recognition as the man sees his eyes.

"Howdy, neighbor," he says, and touches the brim of his hat. "It's a fine store you've got here."

Fat, grasping fingers scrape the toes of his boot, pale and soft as mealworms, and he shakes them of with a grimace.

"You know, it would be a shame to let so much meat on the hoof go to waste." He drops to his haunches and slaps the shopkeep on the belly, and then he shoots forward and battens his fangs onto the side of the man's neck. 

He's too full from his earlier meal to do more than sample, but it's a far sweeter vintage, a good dessert wine. It's a shame he can't save him, bundle him up and take him back to the cabin as a little pick-me-up, but he'd never be able to fit him and his acquisitions onto the bike, and it would take too much time to smuggle him out of town. Too much risk of being seen or heard as he hauled his ponderous bulk out of the store.

He drinks until his stomach gurgles ominously, and then he sits back on his heels and fishes a rag from the pouch cinched at his waist. "Much obliged to you," he says, and wipes his mouth.

The man says nothing. He can't. His ruined throat has swollen shut and cut off the last of his oxygen. It won't be long now. His face is a mottled purple, and his tongue protrudes obscenely from his lips. His grasping fingers claw spasmodically at the wooden floor and harrow fine scratches into the finish.

"Well," he says, and springs to his feet. "I'd love to chat, but I'd best be on my way." He steps around the man and heads for the stairs.

The man lows, a steer barreling down the kill chute. Impending death has not yet numbed his mind, and he knows where he is going. 

"Nnnngh! Nggggh!" he grunts, and he can hear the unmistakable plea in it. _Please. Please_

"I wish I could," he says ruefully. "I truly do. But I've learned what happens to the merciful, and I can't take that chance." He turns and ascends the stairs, his boots light upon the wooden tread.

"Harold?" calls a sleep-muddled voice from upstairs. "'Zat you?"

It's over in less than a minute. She dies before she can scream, her head twisted at a terrible angle. He smooths the covers over her and leaves her to her eternal dream, and then he closes the door behind him and checks the other rooms. Two small bodies, deeply asleep, unaware of the monster in their midst. He watches them for a while, torn between the urge to eliminate every possible witness and a faint vestige of the merciful priest he'd once been. In the end, there is only one choice he can make, and he makes it swiftly.

By the time he descends the stairs, the shopkeep is dead. He moves through the shop unmolested, gathering packages of cotton pads and bottles of aspirin. He measures and cuts yard after yard of fabric--muslin and cotton and wool, silk and satin. The lace he leaves whole. He packs everything into bags and boxes. The bolt of lace he slings over his shoulder. He leaves the way he came, humming under his breath and basking in the comfort of a full stomach. A light wind dances over his skin as he leaves the settlement, and there's a decided spring is his step as he returns to his bike. He's alive and in love and doing his duty as a good and faithful husband.

He leaves the bike several miles before the hive and walks the rest of the way. It might be a day, maybe two, before the bodies are discovered, but they will be found, and he's determined to leave them no clues. The cabin is his home now, the place he intends to raise his children, and he won't have its fragile roots torn out by vengeful humans with guns and pitchforks. He won't see Liese punished for his necessary sins.

The sky has begun to lighten by the time he sets foot in the small yard. Dim lantern light glows in the parlor window, cozy and reassuring, and he smiles as he sets his packages on the porch. A furtive rustling from behind the door, and then it opens to reveal the familiar.

"Good evening, Master," it simpers, and wrings its fishbelly hands.

"Where is Liese?"

Its smooth head bobs. "Asleep in the parlor."

"Take these inside," he grunts. "Don't let her see them." He nods at the boxes and the bolt of lace. "The rest you can put where you like."

"Yes, Master." It hurries forward and gathers the assorted boxes in its black-nailed hands.

"If you damage that lace, I'll kill you," he growls. "A single snag, and I'll unzip you."

"Of course, Master," it answers, and sidles to and fro. Its hands twist and twist, peristaltic and nauseating.

He spins away from it and stalks to the rusty hand pump, where he sheds his duster and shirt and scrubs his face and torso with frigid water that puckers his skin with gooseflesh and stiffens his nipples. He scrubs and scrapes until he's sure there is no trace of blood, and then he dries himself with his shirt and brushes his teeth twice with a sachet of sage and cardamom. When he's sure he's clean, he turns and goes into the cabin.

Liese is curled up on the sofa where he'd left her, head propped on the arm and a book drooping in her slack grip. The lantern flickers on the table beside her. He smiles at the tranquility on her face and crosses to the sofa. He snuffs the lantern with a twist of the knob and eases the book from her grasp. She snuffles and shifts but doesn't wake. He sets the book beside the lantern and reaches out to stroke her face.

She opens her eyes with a reluctant effort. "Nggh?" Her expression clears as recognition comes. "You're home," she murmurs sleepily, and offers him a dreamy smile.

"I am," he agrees, and presses a kiss to sleep-dry lips. "Now let's get you to bed."

He eases her upright, and she winces at the protest from stiff muscles. "What time is it?" She scrubs her sleep-puffy face.

"Almost dawn." He smooths his thumb over her cheek to erase the impression of the sofa's upholstery from her skin.

"You've been gone so long. I thought it was only a few hours."

"I know. It took longer than I expected." He holds out his hand. "But I got you some things. Some aspirin for your pains and some packaged cotton pads."

"Bless you, my love," she says, and takes his hand. She rises from the sofa with a groan. Then she stops. "Where is your shirt?"

"Dirty work. I didn't want to track it into the house."

She purses her lips at that, but she says nothing. Instead, she embraces him. "Oh, honey, you're freezing," she exclaims, and begins rubbing his chest and arms.

"No hot water in the pump, either," he says mildly, but he basks in her attentions. 

"Next time have the familiar heat water for a bath," she chides. "You'll catch your death."

"Catch it? I've already met it."

Her solicitous hands slow. "Don't say that," she says softly, and presses a tremulous kiss to his clavicle.

"I'm sorry," he murmurs, and strokes her hair. "I only meant that no disease can take me from you now."

"It just makes me think of-" She huffs. "Days. Weeks."

"Hush," he soothes. "It's done. Long done. All that matters is now. And now I'm alive and in the arms of my wife. Who I'm sure will warm me up."

A muffled chuckle against his chest. "I'll do my best," she says, and the words vibrate against his flesh.

"Let's get you to bed."

She follows him down the hall. "Where are these cotton pads? I should put one on before I sleep."

"If the familiar has any sense, they'll be in the bathroom."

She shuffles stiffly into the bathroom. The package is on the back of the sink, wedged clumsily between the taps and smothering their toothbrushes. "Nice," she mutters.

He follows her inside and uses the toilet, and when he's done, she takes his place, hitching the hem of her cassock above her waist like a society woman arranging the voluminous folds of her gown. She pulls down her plain, cotton underwear and sits, knees spread.

"Hand me one?" she asks, and nods at the package.

He picks it up and reads the slogan printed on the front. "Have a happy period."

She snorts. "There's a delusion."

He tears open the top and fishes out a square wrapped in wax paper. She plucks it from his curious fingers, tears it open, and unfolds it. Then she reaches into her underwear with her free hand and withdraws a wad of bloody fabric. She tosses it into the nearby wastebasket and replaces it with the thick strip of cotton. Once her bladder empties, she rises and pulls up her underpants.

"Better than Church-issue," she declares, and moves to the sink to wash her hands. "Those were either cardboard or sandpaper."

He moves to stand behind her and wraps his arms around her waist as she scrubs her hands. "You endure this every month?" He rests his chin on her shoulder.

"The curse of Eve. I guess the penance wasn't enough. The Priestesses say it only stops when seed takes root or when a woman grows too old to bear children." She turns off the tap and shakes her hands dry.

"Mmmm." He sweeps the hair from her neck and nuzzles the soft, sleep-warm flesh. "I'll put seed in your belly soon enough," he promises.

Her hand come up to cradle his nape. "I know you will. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the attempt." She pats his nape and slides out of his embrace and ambles to the bedroom. Much more relaxed now, and she yawns as she strips her cassock and crawls into bed.

He sheds his clothes and climbs in behind her. He burrows against her and entangles their limbs and curses the intrusion of her underpants.

"What?" she asks with dozy fondness.

"Nothing. I've just gotten used to having nothing between us."

Laughter little more than a breath. "It'll be done in a day or two." She takes his hand and slips it into her underpants to rest against warm flesh and coarse hair.

He's tempted to extend his fingers and stir them over her until she grows slick and hot with need, but she's so tired, so he simply slips his other hand between their bodies to knead the hard knot in her lower back.

She moans softly, and her drooping eyelids flutter.

The sound ignites his arousal, but he ignores it. She needs his hands more than she needs his urgently-pounding cock, and so he massages and strokes until hard flesh is smooth and pliant. "Sleep," he whispers into her ear. "Rest now, my Liese." He pets the coarse hair of her cunt as his kneading hand does its patient work, and soon, she surrenders to slumber, limp and untroubled in his arms.

He slips his hands from her back and underpants and curls around her in a protective coil, cock tucked snugly against the swell of her ass. It's familiar, comforting despite the sweet torment, and he takes solace in the fact that with the sunset will come another chance to sow his seed.


	9. Sins Come to Light

He's pulled from sleep by a thunderous pounding on the cabin door.

"Sheriff Hicks!" comes the muffled voice from behind the rough-hewn door. "Sheriff Hicks, you've got to come quick! There's been a killin'!"

He sits up in bed and sighs and scrubs his face with his hands to wipe the sleep from his eyes. It's a harder matter to banish it from his muddled head. He yawns and runs his fingers through his hair and blinks blearily at the thin shafts of light that stream through the shuttered windows. A strong, high yellow stripes the warped, wooden floorboard. Well past dawn then.

_Bit of a rarity for you these days, isn't it, Hicks, my boy?_ murmurs a voice as dry and smothering as the desert heat, a voice that whispers of darkened train cars and yellow eyes and the hurtling rattle of a train gone out of control. _Once upon a time, you slept like a baby, with a comfortable hardon and dreams of Lucy dancing in your head. You had it all planned out: a heroic young sheriff with a six-shooter and a pretty wife and a tidy little homestead tending legends and babies._

_But you never counted on that abomination with jaundiced, yellow eyes. Her overbearing father you could deal with. There wasn't a man alive who didn't see it as their duty to protect their daughters from the amorous advances and lascivious intentions of some hot, young buck with a head full of dreams and less sense than God gave a gnat, and anyway, Owen was a hard man, but he was fair, even a touch idealistic if his hopes for farming were any indication, and you were sure that you could win him over in the end._

_Then came that fateful day when you raced to the farmhouse amid reports of an attack and found her parents dead and dying in the wreckage, Shannon lying in the shattered ruin of her kitchen table with her neck snapped and her throat torn out and alarmingly little blood staining the front of her torn dress like a garish bib, and Owen sprawled nearby, still clutching the sorry, splintered remnants of a gun that had done no good. He was still alive enough to know how badly his life had gone tits-up in the span of seconds, but too far gone too tell you what had happened. There was only the blood on the walls and the open cellar door and the ringing absence of Lucy amid the carnage._

_So after you hauled the bodies into town to the doctor's, Shannon to be prepared for a decent burial, and Owen to finish the undignified business of dying in the man's back room, you set out to find the mythic uncle of which Lucy had sometimes spoken in passing, the fearsome priest who had helped to stem the vampiric tide. You got lucky on that score(and in hindsight, it was one of the last times your luck was anything but bitter) and found him rooting through the rubble of the farmhouse, rooting through the wreckage of his usurped life, as it turned out, though you didn't know it at the time. Turns out there was a lot you didn't know._

_But you know now, don't you?_

_You hared out of there brimming with right and might and the blind, dumb conviction of love, convinced they would be enough. You were so full of bravado and bullshit that you even threatened Priest, and oh, isn't that laughable now? Priest was far more tolerant than you deserved, tried to teach you in twenty minutes the discipline it took him years and most of his happiness to learn, and you found out more about yourself and your shortcomings than you ever wanted to know. You figured out, for instance, that even with a gun, you were no match for the eyeless monstrosities that scuttled and clittered in the darkness. You also discovered that love was not a shield invulnerable, that while its hope was limitless, its strength was not. That yellow-eyed bastard kicked you out of the train as if you were nothing but a nuisance, a boy playing soldier among battle-hardened men. You hit the hardpan and bounced down the track like a ragdoll, and while you went ass over teakettle with a head full of shattered illusions rattling around inside your skull like shards of broken china, it was Daddy dearest who saved the day and sent the demon to hell on a billow of hellfire._

_You got the girl and the prestige of being there when the vampire menace was thwarted a second time, but you were also left with scars and burdened with the weight of awful home truths. Lucy might've run to your arms when you staggered up, battered and dusty and too late to do much much good, but she never looked at you with the same fawning, soppy adoration again. She loved you, yes, but it was tempered by the knowledge of your weakness and humbling imperfections. The superman of her dreams was no more. You were just a man now, dirty and exhausted and fumbling for the earth between your feet._

_So you got Lucy and the shiny badge and the homestead on the edge of town, but it's not the happily ever after you thought it be while you were building it with Lucy beneath the stars or in the negligible shade offered by the tin-roof overhang of the jailhouse. It's recognizable in its broad strokes of kissing Lucy first thing in the morning and last thing before you reach over and snuff out the light, and in the sound of her humming in the kitchen while rattles the pots and pans and does her best to put together a morning fry-up with whatever she has to hand, but it's warped and curled at the edges, and some of the finer details have distorted and run, a treasured photograph held too near a pernicious flame. The kisses are sweet but dry, a sip of flat champagne, and sometimes when you make love, it feels like she's a million miles away, gone to a different time and place than the one in your bed, where the sand creeps in no matter how often you shake out the sheets. There's never enough food in the pantry, and most mornings the fry-ups Lucy manages consist of a few scrawny strips of bacon, stale bread fried in the grease, and hash browns made from runty potatoes too dry for anything else. Sometimes there's coffee with grinds in the bottom gritty as mouthfuls of sand, and even more rarely, there are eggs from the folks down the way, who have more hens than mouths to feed. More often than not, Lucy turns the bacon to chewy cinders and fuses the eggs to the bottom of the skillet, and you go to work with nothing but a bellyful of scorched coffee and the memory of that bastard's sneering contempt and the glint of amusement in his eyes as bootheel met solar plexus and you were going, going, gone from a speeding train._

_The job isn't all it's cracked up to be, either. When you first pinned the badge to your chest and slipped your sidearm into the holster at your hip, you envisioned helping people and saving lives, protecting them from the evil that roamed the desert, but more often than not, you end up breaking up bar fights and domestic quarrels and hauling drunks to jail to dry out in the pair of cells, moaning on the shabby cots and pissing in the corners and reeking of cheap rotgut. Now and then, some snaggle-toothed kid with a cowlick will gawp at you as you walk through town with your tin star on your vest, but for the most part, you're invisible, as unremarkable as the dust and tumbleweeds that blow through town, a glorified janitor who keeps the rumpots and other undesirable from the easily-scandalized eyes of more upstanding folks and mopping up the messes the drunks leave behind when they stagger from their cells in the morning, hungover and heaving and squinting against the searing light of the morning sun._

Which is why he very much doubts there has been a killing. Like as not, some stewbum has fallen out of bed or off the john and cracked his pickled skull on the dresser or the edge of the tub and gone to his final reward with his pasty ass in the breeze.

The frenetic battering of his hapless front door sounds again. "Sheriff! Sheriff, c'mon! There's been a killin', I said." High and strident above the thunder of pounding fists.

"All right, goddammit, I heard you the first time," he calls, voice rough with sleep he has yet to shed. "I'm coming." He throws back the covers and swings his legs over the side of the bed.

Beside him, Lucy stirs, and her head emerges from beneath the blanket in a tousle of auburn. "Whas h'ppn?" she mumbles, and blinks at him with gummy eyes.

"Nothing. Just some to-do in town," he answers, and leans down to kiss her forehead. "A drunk, probably. Go back to sleep." He sits up and reaches down to put on his boots.

Lucy's hand rubs a slow circle between his shoulder blades for a moment, and then she tosses back the covers. "I'll put on the coffee. You can't be going out to God knows what with nothing in your system."

"Thanks, honey," he says as his stomach roils and clenches at the prospect.

She slips out of bed and pads toward the tiny bathroom, and once she closes the door, he stands and marches into the living room and crosses to the door, which vibrates beneath the hail of hammering blows. He draws the bolt and opens the door and nearly takes a set of bony, grimy knuckles to the face. They belong to Bob Bevetts, a ranch hand and frequent visitor to the local saloon and gambling hall.

Hicks' bubbling suspicions deepen. "Bob," he says evenly.

"Come quick! There's been a killin' down the general store," Bob says, and dances from foot to foot on his front porch. His boots clatter on the splintering, oft-scrubbed wood, and his eyes are huge inside a face pale as curdled milk.

Skepticism fades, replaced by a creeping unease. "The general store?" That's not one he's heard before. Henry Willard might be fat as a whiskey barrel and twice as obnoxious when he gets on the subject of religion or the penny-ante politics of the settlement, but he's never been hot-tempered, and he certainly doesn't tolerate violence in his store. It's his pride and joy, and he runs a tight ship.

Bob nods, and his uncharacteristically-pasty Adam's apple bobs like a turkey wattle. "Oh, God almighty, Sheriff." It's almost a sob, and Hicks' dread ratchets up another notch. Bob drinks and whores and has spent more than a night drying out in one of the cells, but he's never lied and has never been one for histrionics. "It's so bad, so bad," he moans, and his shock-glazed, too-wide eyes are wet and haunted inside his haggard face. He swallows with a glottal click and rests his hands on his knees, and for one surreal moment, Hicks thinks he's going to puke on his boots. Then he straightens with a shuddering breath and swipes his nostrils with a leathery index finger. "Oh, Lord have mercy," he moans, and his chest hitches.

_Whatever this is, it's not just some old drunk who took one tumble too many,_ he thinks, and his stomach drops.

He steps onto the porch and closes the door behind him. Whatever this is, Lucy doesn't need to hear it.

_That's rich, considering she survived captivity with vampires and some demonic half-breed,_ says a sardonic voice inside his head.

_That's why she doesn't need to hear any of this,_ he counters. _She's seen enough, heard enough. She still has nightmares about what happened to her and wakes up screaming and flailing at the air with a knife long since blackened and twisted in the mangled wreckage of a train. There's darkness in her head to last a lifetime, and I'll be damned if I'll give it more fodder._

"What happened?"

Bob sidles and tugs the collar of his shirt and reaches for the brim of a hat that isn't there, and stymied fingers descend to his scalp to card through his hair. "Henry and Cloretta Willard both," he says, froggy and wavering, as though he's on the verge of tears. "Clo is in the bedroom, neck all twisted around. Henry's in the store, just lyin' there next to the gloves. Sheriff, he's all bloated and purple, and his tongue's hangin' out."

"You sure it wasn't just a heart attack or a stroke?" he asks. He knows it's bullshit even as he says it. Heart attacks don't snap the necks of sleeping wives.

"No heart attack I ever seen does somethin' like that." Bob shakes his head. "I know I ain't no doctor, but no. Besides, that doesn't explain what did for Clo."

_Maybe Henry did for her,_ he thinks darkly. _Maybe they got into a bedtime squabble over politics and Henry took his wild gesticulating too far and whacked Clo in her bony face with one flabby arm. Maybe getting clobbered with his ham hock snapped her scrawny neck and he panicked and did for himself downstairs in a fit of remorse._

_If he wanted to kill himself, there are kinder ways to do it, or at least more efficient. No sense conjuring scenarios until you've seen for yourself._

He braces himself for his next question. "What about the boys?" _I don't want to hear this. I don't._

"They're the ones who found 'em, the older boy anyway," Bob answers, and the relief is so sweet that Hicks sags against the door. "Came tearing out of the store 'round about ten, screamin' at the top of his lungs about somethin' happened to his daddy. I was headin' from the boardin'house to the ranch when he liked to bowl me over. It was me an' Charlie who first went in there and seen-" His jaws snap shut, and his right eye twitches and waters. "-what we seen," he finishes, and sways on his feet.

He nods. "And the other boy? Jacob?" 

"Alice came an bundled 'im off to her place. Both of 'em, actually. That ain't nothin' for boys to see."

He's not sure the parlor of a whorehouse is a place for young boys, either, but he lets it go for the time being. If things at the store are half as bad as Bob claims, seeing the perfumed swell of a whore's cleavage is the least of their worries. "Who found Clo?" He rubs his nape with a dry palm and does his best to ignore the pressure building behind the bridge of his nose. Remote now, little more than an incipient sneeze, but it holds the promise of a full-blown headache down the road. The day's just begun, and he'd just as soon turn around and go back to bed and leave this unholy mess to someone else.

But he doesn't. Instead, he heaves himself upright and runs his fingers through his hair. "All right. Give me a minute."

"Yessir, Sheriff, yessir," Bob agrees, and paces the porch, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans and head bobbing on his neck like an anxious pigeon.

Hicks gives a brusque nod and retreats into the cabin, where he sags against the door and rests his forehead against the rough grain of the old wood. Lucy putters in the kitchen, humming tunelessly under her breath as the floorboards creak under her bare feet and pans clatter in musical accompaniment.

"Who was that?" she calls.

"Bob Bevetts," he replies with a leaden tongue, and the clangor of the pans sounds inside his head like the tolling of a bell. "I've got to go to the general store."

The humming stops, as does the clatter of the iron skillet, and a moment later, Lucy appears in the narrow threshold of the kitchen, brow knitted in concern.

_There's been too much of that,_ he thinks sadly as the mounting pressure behind his nose throbs in time to his heartbeat. His lips twist in a mirthless grimace at the bittersweet memory of the pie-in-the-sky promises he'd made under the stars, the pictures he'd painted of a tidy house and a shining badge and a yard full of children healthy and wild as desert roses.

"What's wrong?" she asks, and hurries to his side. Fingertips white as a spring lily graze his temple in a solicitous caress, and he closes his eyes to savor the contact.

_It's bad, Sheriff, it's so, so bad,_ Bob Bevetts laments inside his head, and he can hear him shuffling and scraping just beyond the door, scuffed bootheels thudding on the boards like a harbinger of doom.

_Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead,_ he thinks, and yellow eyes gleam at him from the darkness behind his eyelids.

"Honey, what is it?" Lucy presses, alarmed now, and turns him from the door. She cups his face in her hands, and when he opens his eyes, she's searching his face with wide, piercing eyes. Not bilious yellow, thank God, but a rich hazel.

He shakes his head. "I don't know," he lies, and kisses her. "I've got to get into town to figure it out."

"Do you have time for coffee?"

He has no appetite for coffee or anything else, but he needs the caffeine, and she needs the distraction, and so he nods. "And maybe some bread, too."

"Toast?"

He shakes his head. "No time. If I don't hurry, the scene is liable to be completely destroyed." The scene. As though he were some swaggering detective in the tattered, sand-scoured remnants of the pulp novels he sometimes finds blowing over the sand like disinterred bones and not some idiot with more bravado than sense just trying to muddle through because he was the one foolish enough to accept the badge when it came to him.

"All right, then," Lucy says. "You go on and get dressed, and I'll have it ready by the time you come out." She bounces on her toes and plants a firm kiss on his lips, and then she spins on her heel and darts into the kitchen to fulfill her promise.

He hurries into the bathroom to conduct an abbreviated version of his customary routine. No shower this morning, just a few quick splashes of cold water from the sink, a piss in the water-stained toilet, and a rushed brushing of his teeth. He spits foam into the sink and washes it away as he rinses his brush, and then he dries his his face with his wrinkled shirtsleeve to spare the damp, threadbare towel hanging on the rust-speckled rod. Once out of the bathroom, he exchanges his shirt for a clean one and runs a comb through his hair. He briefly considers changing his pants, too, but that would require shucking his boots and putting them on again, and he doesn't dare leave Bob Bevetts unattended on his porch for that long, lest he emerge from his living room to find a groove worn in the aging wood.

So his feet remain shod and his pants stick to the skin of his thighs like a caul. He retrieves his holster and its attendant pistol from its place hanging from the headboard and cinches it around his waist. Then he scoops his vest from the floor and slips it on and tugs on the end of the lapels in a fruitless effort to improve its rumpled appearance. A glance in the mirror shows him a kid in a wilted shirt, wrinkled vest and dirty jeans. There are shadows under his eyes despite the full night's rest and then some, and his cheeks are bruised with the beginnings of stubble. It's hardly the image he wants to present as sheriff, but it's the face he's wearing in these grim days, and so he sighs and scrubs at his nape and heads back to the living room.

Lucy is waiting with a cup of coffee and three slices of toast wrapped in a paper towel. "Guess I had time after all," she chirps.

"Guess you did," he agrees, and musters a smile for her enthusiasm. He trades a kiss for the coffee and the bread. 

"You gonna be back in time for supper?"

_His tongue was hangin' out of his mouth._ "I don't know. I hope so."

"I'll be sure to have supper on."

"I'm looking forward to it," he says. Love, he has learned, requires the occasional lie.

He leaves her with a parting kiss and steps onto the porch, where Bob Bevetts sits on the sagging front steps, slumped and wilted in the rising, desultory heat. He turns at the sound of his footfalls and scrambles to his feet. He dusts his palms on the sun-bleached knees of his jeans and reaches for a hat that isn't there again.

"It's this way, Sheriff," he says as though Hicks hasn't made the same walk a thousand times before, and lopes toward town, pitched forward against a strange internal wind.

Hicks grunts in acknowledgment and takes a sip of coffee. It's dark and thick as treacle and bitter as blackstrap molasses, and he grimaces in distaste. He forces down a second sip and a third, and then he turns and dumps the rest into the sand behind him. He shakes the last dregs from the bottom of the chipped, ceramic mug and sets it on the top step, and then he sets off after Bevetts, whose shadows stretches long and thin over the cracked earth.

"It's awful, Sheriff," he calls dolorously over his shoulder. "Just unholy godawful."

He says nothing, but unwraps the slices of toast and stuffs the paper towel into his vest pocket. The bread is toast by dint of Lucy's faith alone, hard and dry and pale. An experimental nibble reveals it to be stale and as tasteless as the paper towel that droops in his vest pocket. He apologizes to his grumbling stomach and gnaws his way through a slice with grim determination. Fossilized paper or not, he needs the meager sustenance it provides. He can't bring himself to eat another, though, and he drops the other two slices behind him like oversized breadcrumbs.

He's still scraping flecks of dried bread from between his teeth with the blade of his tongue when they reach the edge of the settlement, and the slice of stale bread churns in his gut. The main thoroughfare is choked with people. Most of them are crowded around the general store, milling and buzzing about the doorway like indolent wasps and peering into the windows with the gleeful avidity of children at a carnival grotesquerie. Across the street, the perfumed and voluptuous inhabitants of the bordello loiter on the front porch and peer from behind sheer curtains, Even Anna, the madam, has emerged from her lush sanctuary of brocade and silk and velvet hangings to survey the spectacle.

"Hey there, Sheriff," she calls, lithe as a lynx as she lounges against a stout, buttressing post, arm held aloft and powdered cleavage outthrust. It's a pose of habit rather than seductive intent, and he averts his gaze as he raises his hand in greeting.

"Anna," he says politely. "I heard tell you got the boys."

"I do. I've kept them out of the rooms if you're worried about it. Tried to feed 'em, too, but neither has much appetite."

_Little wonder there,_ he thinks drily. _If it's as bad as Bevetts says it is, as I'm beginning to suspect it's going to be, I wouldn't want to eat, either._

"I'd appreciate it if you could look after them a little while longer," he says. "I'll want to talk to them when I'm done here."

"Will do. Maybe when you're finished, you could sit down to a decent meal. You look like shit."

He snorts and gives her a farewell salute, and then he catches up with Bob, who dances on the periphery of the crowd, a hound with the scent of the chase in his nostrils. 

"I told you it was bad, Sheriff," he moans.

"Has anyone but you been inside?"

"I can't speak to when I was gone to fetch you," he replies earnestly, and his eyes narrow with the effort of remembrance. "I told you Charlie was with me when we found 'em. So I guess it was just me and Charlie. That's all I can swear to, anyway." He gives his pants a nervous hitch.

"All right." He claps Bob on the shoulder and begins to push his way through the murmuring throng. "Make way," he orders. "I'm the sheriff. Move out of the damn way." He jostles and prods and elbows. The crowd shifts around him, a mass of fabric and flesh and toothsome curiosity that grates and bruises, but it doesn't part.

"Make way for the goddamn sheriff, goddammit!" Bob brays, loud and nasal and startling over the muted din of the crowd.

The crowd lurches as one, snapped from its hypnotic, waking reverie, and after a moment of logy incomprehension, a seam opens amid the restless bodies. He nods his thanks to Bob and threads through the narrow opening before prurient curiosity reestablishes its irresistible grip and closes it fast. He dips his head and bulls his way past the last of the gawkers, who shy from his presence with a guilty flush, only to resume their positions the instant he steps over the threshold. He blinks against the sudden dimness of the store, and as his eyes adjust, he gets his first glimpse of the godawfulness about which Bob Bevetts had so frequently warned him.

And immediately wishes he hadn't.

"Oh, God," he says thickly, and reels. He takes two unsteady steps to the right, away from the spotless sightline offered by the plate-glass display window Henry polished every morning with fastidious care, and collapses against the narrow wall.

_Don't do that!_ warns a stricken voice inside his head. _There could be evidence._ But it's too late. His stunned legs have gone to water, and it's either the wall or facedown on the floor. So he chooses the lesser of two evils and props himself against the obliging wooden wall.

_Well, it's not suicide,_ he thinks as he breathes through his mouth in an effort to blunt the low, coppery reek of blood and the jungly, piquant stench of piss and shit. _No man would choose to die like that._

_It's bad, Sheriff. It's so, so bad,_ Bob Bevetts wails inside his head, and boy, if he isn't right about that. It is bad, terrible, in fact. It's not the blood; indeed, there is very little, and it's pooled beneath the body in a congealing puddle. Nor is it the pervasive stink of blood and shit or the greedy buzz of the flies that have gathered for the feast. It isn't even the body, sprawled on the floor between display tables and staring at the crowd that has gathered to gawk at its indecent final repose.

It's the eerie, utter stillness. Absence yawns, wide and final. Even the flies disappear into it, there one minute and gone the next, as though they've sailed over the edge of the abyss. He's been here dozens of times, dispatched by Lucy on some domestic errand, and it's always been filled with the lively sounds of commerce. Henry has always presided over the cash register, stalwart as a mountain, and his voice rumbled inside his chest like the grind of shifting earth. Often pompous but never cold, and quick to offer advice or launch into an affable sales pitch the moment a customer's eye turned to the shelves. Boys underfoot, cawing and clamoring until their father occupied their idle, restless hands with broomsticks and buckets and set them to their chores. The scuffle of browsing feet on the floor as people perused his wares and the clink of coins in the till. 

But poor old Henry has made his last sales pitch, and the general store has seen its last sale. The till sits on the counter, mute and blackened with age, its narrow aperture gazing down at its former master in idiotic dismay. There is still the furtive shuffle of feet from beyond the front door, but he knows that once the hardiest of the ghouls congregated outside have mined the store for some gruesome artifact to carry home, a grim souvenir from a dark carnival, none of them will set foot in this place again. The blood will never come out of the floorboards, not really, no matter how hard Henry and Cloretta's heartbroken kin scour them with soap and borax. The hot iron stink of it will rise up from the wood in the desert heat like the breath of the dead, and the good wives of the settlement will leave the food where it sits, gripped by the uneasy certainty that if they serve it to their families, the taint of it will seep into them like contagion.

_Get it together, Hicks,_ he commands himself. _You've got a job to do._

He takes a deep breath through his mouth and pushes away from the wall. The body waits, one pale, flabby hand outflung in beseeching invitation. _Come on in, Sheriff. I've got lots to show you._

_I bet you do,_ he thinks, and his stomach clenches and rolls. He creeps toward the body, hand resting on the butt of his gun. There's no need for such a precaution; Henry is dead as shit and sheetrock, but the butt is familiar and reassuring beneath his hand, and he has always been a believer in doing whatever you need to in order to get by, so he clutches the butt like the head of a cane and hobbles forward until he can see the body clearly.

"Oh, God." His gorge rises, and he gropes blindly for the paper towel in his vest pocket and presses it to his nose and mouth.

Henry Willard did, indeed, die with his tongue hanging out. It protrudes from puffy, purple lips like a dead earthworm, thick and blackening and noisome. His eyes bulge from their sockets. Life has fled from them, but the fear remains, preserved in the amber of his bloodshot, clouded retinas. He stares at Hicks with that terrible, grimacing rictus, and Hicks swallows around a wave of nausea and drops his gaze to the safer territory of his throat.

Except it is no safer, as it turns out. His throat is crushed, pancaked beneath his wattled chin, and the flesh is swollen and mottled. It is also, he realizes, ragged and torn. "What the hell?" he murmurs, and crouches with the muffled crack of protesting knee joints. He shifts over his toes and reaches down to peel the blood-soaked collar of his nightshirt from the ruin of his throat. The fabric is stiff and tacky with dried blood, and his skin crawls, but he pushes the revulsion aside and peers at the wound.

_Animal,_ is his first thought. _Coyote, maybe, or a dog gone rabid,_ but that's not right. The wound is ugly, but it's also too neat. There are ragged edges, but there's no gristle, no cartilage hanging out or strewn over the floor in gelatinous gobbets. There are no pawprints, either, no eye-watering stink of coyote piss on the body or in the immediate vicinity. And while a coyote might subdue its prey with a crushing bite to the windpipe, it wouldn't pass up the chance to glut itself on the delicacies offered by a man as enormous as Henry Willard. There should be more bite marks, chunks gnawed from the ample belly. The organs should be gone, gobbled like sweetmeats. It's too genteel, too tidy to be the work of roving coyotes.

Besides, they're too neat, too blunt aside from the incised canines that bracket the wound. They're possessed of an unsettling familiarity that makes his fingertips tingle with adrenaline.

_I've seen this before, but where?_ He releases the bloody fabric and settles on his heels and worries his bottom lip with his teeth, and so the answer comes to him.

"No," he says softly. "No."

But he's afraid the answer is something else entirely, and so he raises his arm like a man in a dream, pushes up a dingy shirtsleeve, and sinks his teeth into the fattest part of his forearm. He maintains the pressure until his jaws tremble and his skin sizzles with the threat of broken skin, and then he pulls back and studies the impression left in his insulted flesh. 

"Uh uh," he says. "No. Uh uh." He shakes his head and holds his arm level with Henry's throat to compare the results. Blunt, straight teeth bracketed by incised canines. There are differences, subtle variations that speak to strangers in the night. One of the bottom teeth, for instance, is twisted inward, and the upper canines are much, much longer than his, but the resemblance is unmistakable. "Nope, uh uh," he says again, as though denial were strong enough to banish the specter of unpleasant truth, and he tugs his sleeve over his arm.

_You can deny it all you want, Hicks, my boy, but you know exactly what those are, and you know exactly where you saw them. They were on Shannon's neck when you found her in the rubble of her kitchen and all over Owen when you dragged him to the doctor's to finish his dying. They were on his shoulders and arms. His forearms were peppered with them, as though he'd used them to stave off the snapping jaws of some snarling beast. And the thing that left those wounds gone to the bone that festered and sent a good man to an undeserved grave is the same thing that snatched your Lucy._

_No,_ he insists. _It can't be. It's got to be a coincidence, or a copycat, some crazed bandit gone off his head on radiation and bad meth and determined to bring the campfire legend of the yellow-eyed desert walker to life. It can't be anything else. Priest killed it. I saw it die._

_You saw its smoking hat flutter to the earth like a memento meant for a cherished lover, is what you saw,_ amends the morose voice of dreadful pragmatism inside his head. _There were vampire carcasses aplenty and dozens of bodies in the mangled wreckage, townsfolk from Jericho unfortunate enough not to be worth a damn to any of you when Priestess rammed that speeder bike down the snout of that locomotive, but none of you ever found a skull with fangs jutting from the upper jaw. You assumed it had been vaporized in the blast because you wanted it to be true, wanted it to be over so you could take Lucy home and start living your apple-pie life. And Priest let you believe it because he wanted you out of the way._

_No. Priest wouldn't do that. He wouldn't have left if he thought there was still a threat to Lucy._

_Oh, no? Then why did he hare out of town before the wreckage stopped smoldering? He told you it was to recruit other priests to his cause so they could combat the renewed vampire menace, but most of the vampires were so many smoking carcasses strewn over the desert. He should've stayed to help bury the dozens of innocent dead and spend a little time with the daughter he'd defied the Church to save, but he left her with nothing but a vague promise to visit when his work was done. Lucy was a job well done, but that hat was his purpose, his proof of a job not yet done. So he let you believe the monster was dead and left you to your childish fantasies and set off to kill it himself._

He rises from his crouch. "Bob." It emerges as a strengthless croak. He clears his throat and tries again. "Bob!"

Bob appears in the doorway, head bobbing. "Yes, Sheriff?"

"I'm going to look in on Cloretta, and I want you as a witness."

"Oh, yes, sir, Sheriff." Bob hurries forward. He blanches at the sight of Henry's swollen, blue face and turns from it, gaze fixed on the safer territory of the shelves behind the counter.

"You see anything out of place? Missing?" he asks.

Bob studies the shelves. "I can't say I do, but that doesn't mean there ain't." He scratches his head. "I only come in for sundries once a month or so. No wife, no kids, so it's mostly soap and shaving cream and the like." He sidles from foot to foot and scans the room, careful to avoid the stiffening, bloated hump of Henry Willard at his feet. "It doesn't look ransacked. You think Henry caught 'em before they could set to robbing the place?"

"Maybe." _No, I don't think that at all. I don't think what did this gave a shit about money or making off with an armload of canned beans. I think it found exactly what it was looking for._ The bite mark on his arm throbs.

"You know, I do seem to recall that he was supposed to be to be getting a shipment of fabrics this week," Bob muses. "I remember because Zoe was all excited about maybe getting some silk for some bloomers."

"Yeah?" He's not sure where Bob is going with this, nor does he care about the underwear preferences of one of Anna's youngest charges.

"Yeah. I remember 'cause she was more interested in the possibility of them britches than in what we were doing. Trying to do, anyways," Bob says, disgruntled afresh by this remembered slight to his sexual prowess.

"What about it?"

"Thing is, I don't see any silk in the fabric rack." Bob shrugs and stuffs his hands into his pockets. "Could be nothing. Maybe all the ladyfolk bought it up already. Going by the way Zoe was carrying on about it, you'd think it was gold. Or hell, maybe the shipment just ain't here yet. "I don't know his schedule, and maybe some bandits delayed it or took it outright. Charlie says he heard tell of a group of them working a patch not far from here."

Hicks files that information away for future reference and moves to the fabric rack. There are bolts of cotton and gingham and cheap wool harsh as sandpaper against his prodding finger, as well as muslin and satin, but the slot marked SILK in Cloretta's spare, angular hand is empty.

_Probably coincidence. If bandits had done this, there wouldn't've been a stick of furniture left standing, they'd've burned the store to the ground, and they might've taken the boys for good measure. There are plenty of perverts out here with unwholesome urges and a taste for young flesh, and even if they didn't sell them for a bit of coin and a week in some flea-bitten whorehouse, they could've kept them and trained them up to be the next generation of thieves and cutthroats and rapists. And no bandit would tear out a man's throat just for a bolt of silk._

Cloretta will tell the tale, he supposes. If he goes upstairs and finds her cold and violated in her bed, then perhaps this sorry affair can be chalked up to the work of drug-fueled bandits or some out-of-town drunk who wanted more than what Anna's girls were willing to offer and found it here. Maybe Henry heard him bumping around in the dark and quiet and came down here in his slippered feet to protect the livelihood he'd poured his life into. Maybe they'd gotten the drop on him and strangled him from behind, and when Henry was dead and his rifle splintered and impotent, they'd gone upstairs and finished their terrible work and slipped away while the children slept.

_Maybe,_ the dry voice of pragmatism agrees, the brittle, groaning creak of a warped floorboard trod underfoot. _Maybe. But you really don't think so._

He thinks of Henry Willard's throat, crushed and mangled, and of ragged teeth marks in the mottled, torn flesh. He thinks of the showroom, pristine save for the untidy sprawl of Henry's body beneath the cash register, and of the delicate plate-glass window unbroken and unmarred by so much as a smudged fingerprint. Of the pills and liniments and nostrums, that could've been sold or traded on the black market, and of the guns still mounted in their display racks. Of the boys still sleeping in their beds and left to discover their status as orphans in the cold, grey light of dawn.

_No, I don't think so._ His jaw tightens, and his hand reaches for the comfort of his gun butt. "C'mon, Bob. Let's get this over with."

Bob dutifully follows him to the foot of the stairs. "I don't suppose you have another gun?" he says.

"No," he replies. "And I better not find out you've got some snub-nose pointed at my back."

Bob scoffs. "No, sir. I ain't got time for some sorry peashooter. My gun's a Remington 30-30. A real antique. And I left it back at the ranch. I don't trust myself to bring it into town. I ain't bad, Sheriff, you know that. But sometimes when I drink too much, I forget myself and get crazy."

Hicks, who has dragged him to the drunk tank a dozen times, hums in response. Bevetts is a sloppy, loud drunk, not a violent one. The worst he's ever done was to run downstairs into the bordello receiving salon with his cock in full rigor and his balls swinging like a tom's courting wattles and declare himself a candidate for the mayoral race, the lack of mayor in the settlement notwithstanding. He'd frightened several members of the ladies' auxiliary who'd come to shepherd Anna's girls from her clutches and into the welcoming bosom of the Lord, amen, and Hicks had laughed himself into a helpless snorting fit as he'd dragged a listing Bob and his prominent boner down the thoroughfare and to the soberer confines of the jailhouse. The mortally-offended ladies' auxiliary had been denied their prize, and the next morning, Anna had sent a mortified Bob a congratulatory bouquet addressed to "The Mayor."

He and the self-appointed mayor ascend the stairs in silence. The thick, wooden risers pop underfoot but don't groan, and Hicks idly admires the craftsmanship. If only his own house were so sturdy, warm and snug and solid and not one good dust storm away from coming down around his ears. Bob creeps in his wake, breath harsh in the unnatural stillness. He pauses at the top of the stairs, and the air goes to syrup in his lungs. He knows what's waiting for him in the room at the far end of the hall, and he feels like an interloper as he surveys the Willards' living quarters. Two doors on the right and two on the left, and as he inches down the corridor, he passes a black-and-white photo of the family in a tarnished, brass frame. Cloretta is prim and unsmiling in her Sunday best, and the boys stand in front of her, stiff and unprepossessing in starched collars and ties too wide for their gangly bodies. Henry presides over all in a waistcoat that bulges alarmingly over his ample belly, moustache waxed to immobility and hands resting on the back on Cloretta's chair. Bulbous and dignified and years away from a horrifying, ignominious end on the floor of his cherished store.

"Damn," he breathes. He passes the picture and peers into the open doors on the right. Boys' rooms, with small beds and thick, crocheted rugs on the floor. Books and balsa-wood flyers on handmade shelves. A tin soldier in the middle of one rug like a third victim, bayonet fixed and bloodless. A sock monkey propped on a pillow and staring at him with haunted, lidless eyes.

"You go in here?" He jerks his head in the direction of the rooms.

"No, uh uh. Just...just the back bedroom there."

He approaches the bedroom in question. The door is open, and from his vantage point, he sees the window opposite. Sheer linen curtains hang limply from cheap copper rods, and the incoming sunlight illuminates the dust motes that swirl in the desultory air. There's a handsome writing desk beneath the window. It's bare save for a blotter and a letter holder positioned on the far edge with fastidious exactitude. 

He knows what he'll see when he goes inside, and so he hesitates and lingers on the threshold. He's seen death before, on the hunt for Lucy and in its terrible aftermath, when he'd picked through charred bodies in search of a monster and breathed through his mouth to blunt the noxious reek of burnt hair and blackened flesh, but he's never been so intimately familiar with the lives it had stolen. He'd bought soap and razors and the occasional scrap of fabric from Henry and chatted about ammunition and gun oil and the best way to maintain leather. He'd ruffled the boys' hair as they galloped past in the throes of a game of cowboy and bandit. Cloretta could be waspish and gossipy and set in her ways, but she'd also fixed him a pot of soup and some liniments when he'd caught the croup a few years back, and she'd stopped in now and then to check on Lucy when they'd first set up house in that shoddy little cabin held together by hope and hubris. The townsfolk on that train had been mere bodies, abstract figments and fragments of other people's lives, but the Willards had been real, skin and bone and inviting laughter. He doesn't want to see them like this, empty husks with clouded eyes and skin gone blue and waxy and cold as marble. He doesn't want to remember Henry's tongue protruding from his lips like a dead sea cucumber, or Clo's neck lolling at an unspeakable angle. He doesn't want to see what the demon who haunts his nightmares has left of her.

_I don't want to go in there,_ he thinks. _I don't want to see._

But he will see. Because it's his job, and because someone has to.

_Someone has already seen,_ he reminds himself. _The Willards' eldest boy woke up this morning and saw more than any child should ever have to. He came downstairs and found the mess that was his father and ran screaming into the street, headlong into poor Bob Bevetts, and you know from bitter experience that image is never going to leave his head. He'll be seeing it long after his eyes have called it quits, and you'll be lucky if you're not hauling him down to the drunk tank ten years from now. Only odds are pretty good he won't be announcing his candidacy for mayor. Nope; his pronouncements will be of a much darker persuasion._

_So if that boy can see what he saw and still have the presence of mind to run for help, then you can nut it up and do your job, Hicks, my boy._

He squares his shoulders and draws what comfort he can from the heft of his gun in its holster.

"I don't want to go in there," Bob says from behind him, a dolorous echo of his own reluctance.

"Then don't. Either wait at the top of the stairs or go downstairs and make sure no one's trying to make off with a souvenir."

"Yes, sir, Sheriff," Bob says, and the gratitude in his voice only heightens his sense of dread. Hicks can practically _hear_ the tug of Bob's proverbial hat, and then the claustrophobic yet oddly reassuring weight of his presence recedes. Footsteps sound on the stairs, and his voice drifts from the showroom. "Oh, sweet Jesus."

_Please don't let him puke on the body,_ he thinks, and forces himself into the room.

He can't bring himself to face Cloretta Willard just yet, and so he avoids the bed and opts to examine the walnut armoire opposite its foot. There's nothing to draw his attention, but he opens it anyway in an effort to delay the inevitable. The wardrobe is as spare as the rest of their lives and holds a neat row of shirts, pants, and skirts arranged on wire hangers. A pair of tatty slippers rests on the sole shelf. They're cornflower blue and embroidered with a pink rose, and in his mind's eye, he sees Cloretta slipping them off at the end of a long day, humming absently and rubbing her bony feet as she closes the door and shuffles to the bed to nestle herself beside the snoring bulk of her husband. It's a perversely voyeuristic image, intimate and intrusive, and he shuts the door.

_You've put it off long enough,_ he chides himself. _Turn around and get it done. Just confirm death and Bevett's story, and you can get the hell out._

He takes a steadying breath and turns on legs gone to wood, and then he simply stares, surprised. That Clo Willard is dead, there is no doubt. She's pale as the sheets she's lying under, and the hands folded atop the thin coverlet are spidery and stiff. It's what he doesn't see that shocks him. He'd expected bulging eyes and a grotesquely-lolling neck and a body sprawled and exposed to the startled, prurient eyes of those who would discover it, but her eyes are closed, and her greying auburn hair fans over the pillow. The thick strands are incongruously beautiful in the soft sunlight that spills through the window beside the bed. No indecent splay of parted thighs and bared breasts; just a woman arranged in stately repose. It's the stuff of poetry and Renaissance paintings and Arthurian legend, the lady of Shalott drifting on the flat, silver surface of the river, and he blinks in bewilderment.

"Bob!" he calls. "Bob, come on up here a minute."

Skittering footsteps tramp up the stairs, and Bob appears a moment later, hovering uncertainly just beyond the doorway. "Yes, Sheriff?"

"Did you touch anything in here?"

Bob shakes his head. "No, sir."

"Are you sure?" he demands. "Tell the truth now." He advances on Bob, who quails and retreats a pace. "Did you touch Mrs. Willard? Maybe cover her up, try to make her decent?"

"No! Good Christ, no!" Bob cries, and his lips draw back in a revolted grimace. "Jesus Christ, I could never- She's _dead_. I couldn't." His hands clench into spasmodic fists, and he retreats another step.

_Another step like that, and he's going ass over teakettle down the stairs. He and Henry will be a matching set._

His stomach clenches and rolls at the macabre thought, and he raises a placatory hand. "All right. I had to ask. Come on away from the stairs before you kill yourself."

Bob blinks and turns his head to look behind him. "Shit!" He lunges away from the staircase.

"Think carefully. Did Charlie do this?"

Bob ponders the question. "No. She was like this when we found her. I'd swear to it. Besides, Charlie took off. Last I saw him, he was over t'Anna's with the boys." He cocks his head. "Why?"

_Because this is wrong. If what I think did this, it wouldn't be so prim and proper about it, so damn circumspect. It would've reveled in it, left her on crude display, left her with her head lolling and her eyes open and her bony legs exposed. It wouldn't have closed her eyes and preserved her modesty beneath the covers. Christ, it wouldn't've tucked her in._

_Come to think of it, none of this is its style. Henry, maybe, but not the rest of it. It loves blood and terror and chaos. This room should be splattered in red, blood pooled on the sheets and stippled on the curtains and misted on the ceiling. It should've opened her from guts to gullet and strung up the former like party streamers._

_And it never would've left the boys alive,_ whispers the voice of doubt. _It would've taken its time with them, pulled them apart piece by piece and smiled while it worked. If it was feeling particularly festive, it might've made them watch it slaughter their parents before it started on them. There is no way those boys should still be alive._

_Maybe it was interrupted,_ he muses. _It certainly had a fine old time with Henry._

_But if it was interrupted, then why didn't anyone raise the alarm until this morning?_ counters the voice of reason. _If someone heard the struggle, they would've come to investigate, most likely with a gun._

_Fat lot of good that did Henry,_ he reminds himself, and thinks of Henry's prized Remington, snapped like so much dry kindling, stock splintered and barrel sheared in half.

_Well, then, you should have another body, some do-gooder lying in the doorway or crumpled in the storeroom._

_Maybe it crammed the body under a bed or into the crawlspace,_ his mind suggests.

_No. Like I said, not its style. Not showy enough. If he'd killed someone else, they'd be here with the others. This thing isn't much for subtlety._ He thinks of Jericho, smoldering and abandoned in the clear morning air, silent save for the mournful creak of a tin windmill and the tinny, warble of distant music. Every last inhabitant killed or simply gone, with nothing to mark their presence but a scrap of torn cloth or a smear of blood or a fallen pocket watch glinting in the sun. And three bodies crucified in the middle of the thoroughfare, cassocks snapping in the breeze.

_On the contrary, I'd say it was very subtle,_ says a cool, dispassionate voice, the voice of schoolmasters and college professors and polished defense attorneys in waistcoats with shiny, brass buttons. _It toiled in silence and obscurity for years, so careful and unobtrusive in its movements that the Church was unaware of it until it was almost too late. Even its former brothers in arms had no inkling of its existence until Priest came face to face with it on top of the train. What's more, it helped the Queen breed an army to overrun the city. It would have, too, if Priestess hadn't jury-rigged that speeder and blown that train to Kingdom Come, it would've succeeded. Lucy would've become its pretty little fuck puppet, and humanity would have been blotted from the earth in a howling tide of bared fangs and snapping jaws._

_And let's talk about Jericho, shall we? Perhaps there_ was _an element of the theatrical in it, the gaudy, a lunatic carnival of pain and terror with dead priests presiding over the midway like a macabre centerpiece, but there was subtlety to it, and make no mistake. How many settlements and piddling outposts on the edge of nowhere did that train pass through before it rolled into Jericho and stripped it bare? Ten? A dozen? How much stealth must it have taken to slide into those towns in the middle of the night and cull the sleeping inhabitants without being detected? It is in a vampire's nature to be indiscriminate in its killing, after all, or so says the Church. And yet, that train glided into settlement and outpost and left again with no one the wiser until dawn broke and the remaining townsfolk discovered empty beds and deserted posts. There were reports of missing travelers or delivery caravans that never made it to their destinations, but such were the hazards of life on the ragged, rugged outskirts, and no one made much of a fuss._

_It wasn't until Jericho that it indulged in a bit of spectacle, and in truth, that wasn't what brought it down in the end. It was Lucy. If it hadn't taken her, it never would have drawn Priest's attention, never would have set him in pursuit. The sacking of Jericho and the disappearance of its citizenry would've been put down to overzealous bandits, and the vampiric horde would've reached the city undetected. The Church would've collapsed in an orgy of blood and violence, and you would've died along with the rest of mankind. It wasn't showmanship that thwarted it, but simple, dumb luck. It might be cruel and without conscience, but it is not without subtlety._

_And what about Lucy, Hicks, my boy?_ interjects the sneering, pitiless voice inside his head. _According to her, it was the model of restraint, the picture of propriety. It never touched a hair on her head, never leered or groped or took liberties. And you know it could have. You felt its strength firsthand when it kicked you from the train with a half-hearted punt, a god swatting an impudent fly. If it had wanted to hurt her, to take what she wouldn't give, it would've been easy. Lucy is smart and tougher than she looks, but she's also small and mortal, so painfully human. It would've been no contest._

_It hit her,_ he points out, and anger bubbles at the memory of the ugly, black bruise that had bloomed on her cheek. Her face had swollen on that side, and she'd talked with an odd, rubbery lisp until it subsided. Chewing had been a delicate affair, too, and his heart had ached as he'd watched her slurp on a piece of bread like a toothless cur.

_She was coming at it with a knife,_ counters the defense attorney, pompous and tut-tutting and reveling in its role as the devil's most ardent advocate. _And it could've done far more damage if it wanted. Just look at poor Henry down there, bloated and mangled with his neck flattened to the width of a crushed straw. Or Shannon and Owen, for that matter. Lucy got a lovetap and should count herself lucky._

He snorts. _Luck,_ he thinks bitterly as he approaches the bed and Mrs. Willard's body. _Is that what they call it when you can't sleep and spend the night sitting beside the window with a shotgun loaded with sanctified rounds between your knees? Or when you wake up screaming from nightmares about yellow eyes and long, black duster jackets and eyeless faces that loom out of the dark around the bars of your cage? Or when you shy from the touch of the man you love because his breath on your neck reminds you of a low, dirty, voice hissing blasphemy in your ear?_ After all, if you're not committing sin, you're not having fun.

_You can hardly disagree with that one, now can you, Hicks, my boy?_ leers the needling voice of conscience. _After all, you're not above committing a little sin yourself now and then. In fact, I suspect that's what's really got your dander up. Ever since the monster blew through town and carried your love away, there's been remarkably little sin committed in that rundown little shack on the outskirts of town. Her fires might still burn, but their warmth never seems to reach you anymore._

He pushes the thought away. He's too tired to wrestle with it, and now is hardly the time to ponder the chill that has settled over his bed. He stands over the body of Mrs. Willard. Upon closer inspection, there is nothing of poetry or wistful Arthurian legend here. Clo is no lady of Shalott, drifting down the river in heavenly repose. She's a middle-aged woman lying dead in her bed, bony hands folded across a chest flat as desert hardpan. No plump lips or rosy cheeks or glossy sheen to her hair, just crows' feet etched into pale, waxy skin and hair fanned over the pillow in a spray of dead autumn leaves.

And the smell, of course. This close, he can smell the rot of her, spoiled meat and rancid fat and curdled cheese. His eyes water at the ripe piquancy of it, and he blinks back tears. He'd intended to pull back the sheet and inspect the body for signs of trauma or a baser assault hastily concealed by well-intended hands, but he doesn't. Instead, he studies her face, stiff and cadaverous against the pillow. There are no bruises or swelling or other signs of violence. Her throat is intact. He reaches out and prods it with a fingertip and quickly recoils from the cold, unyielding flesh.

He grimaces and wipes his finger on the fabric of his jeans, and then he curls his fingers into a fist to rid them of the unpleasant, clammy tingle.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Willard," he murmurs. "I'm sorry I didn't kill the bastard when I had the chance." He grabs the sheet and pulls it over her head. For a moment, there's nothing but an unsettling blankness, and then the sheet settles into the angles and contours of her face to form a death mask. He freezes, suddenly sure that her mouth will open in a great, rattling breath to suck the clinging fabric inside, but it never does. The thin cotton simply carves out her eyes and settles over her beaky nose like a fussy artist's concealing drape.

Now that the thought of Cloretta Willard rising from the dead with her mouth agape has entered his mind, it refuses to leave. It lodges there like a burr. It'll burrow deeper if he lets it, set down tenacious roots alongside sharp, white fangs and yellow eyes, so he turns on his heel and flees, closing the bedroom door behind him. The hectoring voice of the policeman inside his head laments the contamination of the scene, but he doesn't care. He lacks even the most rudimentary tools with which to process or document the scene, and he suspects that the perpetrator won't come quietly if caught. Its capture, if it comes, will come on a tide of blood and splintered bone, and when he finds it, he has no intention of bringing it before the magistrate who comes through once every three months. He's going to kill it, sever its head with a righteous blade of purified and blessed silver, but not before he makes it pay for what it did to Lucy.

_And what you think it did. Don't forget that, Hicks, my boy,_ purrs his nettled, prurient conscience,

He stalks down the stairs and out the front door. Bob Bevetts, bless his dogged soul, is still at his post, bowlegged and somber and mule-neck stubborn in the face of the milling, surging crowd.

"No, you can't go in there," he says to Jack Miller, a farmer and sometime tailor who moonlights as the undertaker when the need arises.

_Well, there's a need now,_ Hicks muses morosely, and squints at the sudden brightness of the sun. To Jack, he says, "You'll be seeing them soon enough. Doc Cochrane needs to look at them first."

"Are they dead, then?" asks a shrill, cawing voice, eagerness in the guise of scandalized concern.

"Yeah, they're gone," he says, and the news ripples through the crowd like electrical current.

"Sheriff! Sheriff!" calls another voice. "I need to get in there! I'm a member of the press."

"Since when? We don't even have a newspaper," he retorts. He turns to Bob, who sidles closer and hitches his pants. "Go on and fetch the doctor," he orders. "Tell him to bring the cart. When you get back, I'm gonna go talk to Charlie and see about the boys."

Bob nods. "Yes, sir, Sheriff," he says. He rises on his booted toes and gives an ungainly salute, and then he sets off down the street with grim resolve.

It isn't long before he's back, trudging up the street with a worn leather strap around his middle, pulling a light, wooden cart like a dray horse. The points of his boots churn in the dry, sandy dirt as he lumbers toward the store, and he grunts and swears under his breath. Beside him walks Doc Cochrane, a slight, short, dapper man in a linen shirt and black, wool vest. He carries a thick, black bag in one hand, and the circular, wire frames of his glasses glint in the sunlight. He raises his hand in desultory greeting as he approaches.

"Afternoon, Sheriff," he says, and sniffs. He stops to knock the dust from his shoes and scrape the sides against the edge of the floorboards. Once they're clean to his satisfaction, he steps up and offers his hand. "Bob tells me you need the wagon," he says quietly.

He nods. "It's bad." _It's bad, Sheriff, so, so bad._

Cochrane sniffs and wriggles his moustache. "I've seen a thing or two."

"Not like this, you haven't."

Cochrane considers this, eyes sharp inside his benign face. Then he gives a single nod. "All right. I appreciate the warning." He shifts his bag from one hand to the other with the creak of old leather, and then he steps around him and into the store.

Footsteps on the meticulously-scrubbed wood. Then, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph." A heavy thud as the good doctor drops his bag.

Hicks follows him inside. "You okay, doc?" he asks, and rests a hand on his shoulder.

Cochrane manages a weak nod, eyes fixed on the body. He's pale and disbelieving and infinitely more fragile than he'd been a moment before, when he'd strode in here with the education of long experience. 

"I told you it was bad, doc."

"Yeah," he says, and reaches up with a somnambulistic hand to push his glasses onto the bridge of his nose. "Yeah, you did." He utters a mirthless back of laughter and leans against the counter. "Jesus Christ." He shakes his head. "I've seen some things--farm accidents, tramplings, the occasional drunken knife fight. I saw some things during the vampiric wars that-Jesus God. The things those monsters could do when they had a mind. But this-" He gestures toward the body with a graceless hand and lets it flop to his side. He immediately raises it again and crosses himself with listless taps of his fingers, and then he sighs and bends to retrieve his bag.

"You found him like this?" he asks as he trudges closer and surveys the body.

Hicks nods. "Bob Bevetts came running to my house this morning, screaming about a killing. I got here and found this."

The doctor grunts. "You sure he didn't touch the body?"

"He swears he didn't." 

"Bob isn't the most reliable witness." He drops to one knee, fingers tented on the floor to brace himself.

"Maybe not," he agrees. "But he was stone-cold sober when he came pounding on my door."

Cochrane hums and adjusts his glasses. "His throat's been crushed," he observes in appalled wonderment. A finger drifts out to probe the gaping wound in Willard's neck. "My God. These look like..."

"Teeth marks?" Hicks finishes.

"Yeah, but no animal could've done this. It's too neat. If this were a jackal or a coyote, there would be more damage. And no animal would crush its prey's throat so completely. This is methodical. Besides, these look..." He removes his glasses and scrubs his face with his palm.

Hicks rolls up his sleeve. "Like this?" He thrusts his forearm under the doctor's nose.

The doctor blinks and then looks up at him, blanched and sickly.

"I bit myself earlier. Wanted to be sure I was seeing what I was seeing. It look familiar?"

"Except for the top incisors. They're too long, almost like a rattlesnake."   
Hicks says nothing. He waits.

Realization dawns on the doctor's face, incredulous and horrified. "You're saying a human did this?"

_Not exactly, no._ "I need your discretion on this. If word gets out that some superhuman freak is on the loose, folks are liable to panic and shoot every traveler that wanders into town."

Cochrane nods. "I can keep it under my hat. Can't say the same for Bevetts and Charlie."

Hicks grimaces. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. With any luck, people will just write 'em off as rumpots."

"All right. I'm going to take the body, give it a once-over. Might need some help, though. He's not exactly svelte, and I'm not young anymore."

"Clo's upstairs."

Cochrane's face falls. "Shit. The boys?"

"Over at Anna's."

His shoulders sag with relief. "Thank God for small favors."

"I'll send in Bob to help with the bodies." Hicks claps the doctor on the arm.

"Where are you going?"

"To talk to the Willard boys." It's the truth as far as it goes and as much as he's willing to tell. No one needs to know that he's also going to talk to a priest about a demon that's risen from the dead, a desert walker with yellow eyes and the strength of the Devil in his bones.

He steps into sunlight that holds no warmth and spits into the dirt. His stomach gives a pitiful grumble as he crosses the thoroughfare to Anna's bordello and the waiting Willard boys, and behind him, a sound rises from the crowd in front of the general store, insectile and febrile as the swarming of flies.


End file.
